30 Ways to Conquer Mars
by musubi.kei
Summary: 30 kisses challenge for ZechsxNoin; Z&N survive the Pacifist future, and themselves, in 30 loosely chronological one-shots.
1. Face This Way: Under the Mistletoe

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#001 こっち向いて  
A.C. 196, December: 「Under the Mistletoe」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.  
**...**

While Christmas was officially over, the Preventers decided that in the light of recent events, it could bear to be extended just long enough for them to have a chance at a party. Their biggest surprise was from Lady Une, who never did things by halves and proved her philosophy extended towards play as well by throwing them one comparable to any nobleman's, without the stuffed shirts.

Parties made Zechs uneasy, especially without a mask that he can hide his boredom behind. It wasn't the company; he was just an intensely private person, even now, when his secrets are no longer relevant to the world. Standing alone in the middle of a room full of people made him feel clumsy and exposed.

Noin, on the whole, was not a partying type of person, although she did enjoy the comfort of being surrounded by good company, especially on nights such as these. These past days have been so hectic, it was good to be able to relax for a feel moments without fear of the world falling to pieces.

Outside, as the snow drifted down over the world, she smiled, curled up in a secluded window seat with the cold glass cooling her brow and the heavy velvet curtains turning the sounds of drunken celebration into a pleasant background buzz, remembering for the first time in many years, the Christmases from when she was a girl at home.

"There you are." Zechs. She did not hear him come up, but she could feel his presence, just as he had not so much searched for her as looked briefly about the room and set off with certainty towards her position.

"Noin, you dragged me to this party, it's only right you bear through it with me." He demanded.

"Would it kill you to be social once in a while?" She grumbled, watching his reflection on the frozen glass.

"Yes."

She grunted, and closing her eyes, would have none of it.

"Hey Noin," he persisted, tickling her cheek with something prickly and smooth. "Look over here."

Noin turned to regard him with an expression of disdain, but before she could say anything, his lips dived in to deliver a soft pressure on the tip of her nose.

She blinked. "What's that for?"

"Per la fortuna." He smiled, _for luck_, presenting her with a sprig of mistletoe tied up in glittering red and gold ribbon. "And because I forgot to get you a proper present."

"Hn," she turned the winter plant over in her hands. "Wasn't this hanging up by the fireplace?"

He chuckled, possibly an acknowledgement of his guilt, and squeezed himself into the alcove by her feet.

"Can I stay here with you? I'm afraid there are several young ladies by the door duking it out for the right to accost me in my quarters tonight."

She snorted, a most unladylike sound.

"You know you bring it on yourself. Oh well," she sighed, and scooting around to pillow her weary head against him, added, "you can make yourself useful while you're here."

**...**


	2. News We've Heard: Aerare, Non Rapito

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#002 音沙汰  
A.C. 197, February: 「Aerare, Non Rapito」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

The atmosphere in the Preventers' headquarters was oddly heavy today, as though the building itself was holding its breath, waiting for something. February is the worst sort of season for brooding, Noin decided, flipping the antique 4.5 milimetre Kiss of Death that madre had given her as a precaution when she first started at Lake Victoria back and forth across her steepled fingers. The problem was Zech's birthday.

Most people threw a party of some description on their birthdays. Some demand presents, others give out presents. Some like it big, some like it small, some like to party with strangers and others prefer intimate gatherings; Noin herself spends the weeks leading up to those milestones accepting other people's congratulations and goodwill, then spends the big day itself mostly alone, getting drunk as a skunk. Before discovering alcohol, she used to allow herself to cry herself to sleep that one night out of every three-hundred-and-sixty-five-and-a-quarter. The point is everybody tries to commemorate it in some way; everybody wants someone to remember, one way or another.

Not Zechs.

No, Zechs finds a comfortable spot and hibernates for three days, then donnes his skulking persona and goes about his life, minus three days. That's sixty-three days of his life he refuses to acknowledge, so far. That kind of wastefulness irks her.

This year, he had chosen her bed, in her dorm, despite the room the Preventers had appointed for his use, forced her to bunk in with Sally for three days without even letting her get her toothbrush, and when the time was up, when she finally found her door unbarred, he was simply gone.

Again.

Just when she thought he was getting to become human again, too. Granted, he did leave a message this time, so he was trying. They do need to have a talk about whether or not scribbling on her bathroom mirror in her favourite lipstick was an acceptable way for him to leave a message, though.

"Aerare. Non rapito"

"Need air. Not kidnapped". That was six days ago. She had to admit, she thought it cute that he would use her native Italian, but the message itself made no sense at all and she wasn't sure if she should be amused or angry, especially after discovering he had walked off with her favourite leather jacket. Had he woken up one day, decided to go for a walk and never came back? Although now that she's put it into words, it does sound like something Zechs Merquise might do.

She has known his plans for days. It was quite obvious, after a fashion, just the sort of thing that would appeal to him. She just didn't know what to do about it. Noin heaved a huge sigh, as though she could lift the entire office's mood by herself with that simple action. Most questions that people ask when in situations like these are irrelevant.

The only question that mattered was: what did he expect her to do about it?

Sometimes Noin feels so much like the male in their partnership that she has to check herself for the right biological equipment.

**...**


	3. Jolt!: You Have Forty Seconds

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#003 ユル!  
A.C. 197, February: 「You Have Forty Seconds」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

If you overlooked his mild mannerisms and reading habit, and even the long platinum hair that any woman would claw her jealous eyes out for, the man sandwiched on the lower deck between the one-eyed miner and the widow with her four wailing kids might have fit in easily enough; but not to old Auldo, who had a keen eye for people, even half-blind at seventy-six.

The nails peeking from his crude cut-off gloves were too even and his pose, one long leg tucked under his body and the other under his chin, spoke for too much etiquette. He did not smell of anything and his clothes, though worn and serviceable, were too well-cared-for. Mostly, he was too _clean_. But above all, he seemed too calm when a great jolt rocked the shuttle, like a man who has foreseen everything and now merely waited for the scenarios to pass him by.

These decks are not the norm for the likes of him. It belonged to the Initial Adjusters, those desperate and destitute enough to risk their lives and well-being in unexplored, undeveloped territories for the promises of a little work, and the dodgers, those haunted by things to hide and secrets to run from. This man was neither, he was sure of it. If he were any judge, Auldo would have pegged him for nobility. Perhaps even a military officer, just the sort of man any number of young girls could fancy for their prince.

An irresponsible young man, then, running from certain consequences. Perhaps the lack of guilt in his squared shoulders is just a sign of an inherent self-righteous arrogance. That would not be inconceivable for someone of his apparent class. Damn those nobby types, being better than all the rest of us and stealing the dreams of our young women, but humanity needed them. Millenniums of wars and revolutions, fighting for equality, and in the end, we just went right back to the old ways, different verse, same song.

That was why Auldo liked space and was willing to do anything to keep living amongst the stars, even swallow his pride as a genius astrophysics engineer and put on the dull blue cap and coveralls of a shuttle janitor. Out here, in these transient moments, nothing touches him when he takes these glimpses into other people's varied lives, like channel surfing or browsing through a book store, experiencing all the drama and adventure without committing to the consequences of knowing them or their world.

"Attention Mars Terraformation Shuttle," a low, even, voice crackled over the old-fashioned public announcement systems, and Auldo watched the young man twitch, for a fraction of a second, as though struck by lightning. The image of a dark-haired woman with smoldering purple eyes appeared in the overhead video displays.

"This is the Preventer cruiser Adler, requesting the immediate and peaceful surrender of passenger number 2000476. If you do not comply, we shall be forced to board this shuttle and conduct a formal arrest." The gigantic image shifted and leaned closer into the screen, as if she could see him right through him. There was a devilish look in her eyes, but her voice was completely, pleasantly, calm. "You have forty seconds."

On board the Adler, Preventer Water was shaking her head disbelievingly at her colleague.

"Why didn't you tell us where he was going if you knew all along? Lady Une will have your head for this."

"She knows," Noin replied evenly, her mouth set in a grim line as she docked to the Mars Terraformation Shuttle. "Or she wouldn't have sent me." She felt bad about betraying Zechs to the Preventers. On the other hand, she had not actually said anything. It was his oversight, really. He should have seen that Lady Une was sly enough to simply send Noin out to retrieve him instead of attempting to squeeze her for information.

Although, squeeze her she did, and planted two hearty kisses on her cheeks in a surprisingly uncharacteristic display of passion. "Oh Lucrezia, hurry!" were her whispered orders. "Don't let him fuck it up this time!" Noin could only guess at her meaning and what incredible intuition could have revealed to her so suddenly that this was the day he had planned to leave Earth, possibly for good.

The airlock cycled and clicked.

Down in the lower decks, the incongruent young man looked up, into the stern purple eyes of the Preventer agent, and got on his feet. Auldo watched him stretch and stroll leisurely with his hands in his pockets towards the nearest exit, an olive coloured duffel swinging freely from his arm.

"Hey you!" The old man called out to him, showing off his wide, toothless grin. "What are you running away from, boy?"

The man pulled his cap tighter over his face, until all that showed was the wry smile of a man going to face his consequences.

"It's not what I'm running from that matters," he replied. "It's what I'm going towards that counts."

**...**


	4. Undefeated: A Fine Woman

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#016 無敵  
A.C. 197, February 29, 15:45: 「A Fine Woman」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

Even without sharing so much as a warm word between them, Zechs and Noin could make anyone feel like a third wheel. And yet, as they stood in silence over the coffee machine, it was as if they were each in their own little world, oblivious to all else.

As Sally watched, Noin passed a steaming mug towards her partner, who caught it before she could realise she had misjudged the counter entirely, and repositioned a second mug before she could pour a stream of hot coffee down its side, neither of them once looking up from the reconnaissance reports in their hands. It was beautiful, like a clockwork dance.

Here the lulling allemande of routine, here a partita of the paperwork blues, and here, the crashing discord that was Lady Une thundering soundlessly in from her morning meeting with Earth Sphere Unified Nations representatives, towards the largest video screen. She clutched a pair of files to her as though they were all that kept her heart from leaping out of her chest, lips pressed into a pale, grim, line, as the monitor warmed up to a middle-aged man wearing what was clearly a toupee.

"...denounced the actions of former OZ Colonel Zechs Merquise, also known as Milliardo Peacecraft of Sanq, and his accomplice, former OZ Lieutenant-Colonel Lucrezia Noin. The pair will be held for crimes against the Earth sphere's unified nations at a date yet to be determined…"

The Preventers' furious leader turned off the news transmission and dumped the blue folders unceremoniously on the nearest desk. All their documents were colour coded: yellow for mission reports, red for mission orders, black for recon information, and blue for personnel information. Normally unfazed under the worst of situations, she had to clear her throat several times for the announcement she knew she had to make, spitting out the words as though they were burning lye.

"Effective immediately, Zechs Merquise and Lucrezia Noin are no longer members of this organization. Earth Sphere leaders have demanded immediate Preventer action securing their arrest, which we have taken under advisement. Regretfully, the fact of the matter is until the Unified Nations' finance committee approves our budget expansion proposals, we simply do not have the resources to spare on pre-emptive measures against two _highly skilled_ ex-OZ officers without credible threat." She cracked a wane smile then, holding both Noin and Zechs' eyes in turn.

"Fire, Wind, you have twenty-four hours to clear out."

Preventer Earth clicked her heels together, executing the elegant officer salute of the Organisation of the Zodiac Specials with precision, and quick-marched into the safety of her office, where her pained tears could fall unwitnessed. This is all she can do for them, now. The rest was up to Zechs-_und_-Noin, whose team-up was speculated by the Lake Victoria Academy alumni to be singularly invincible, if they could ever stop fighting amongst themselves. "Well," she regarded Trieze's picture, "it's time we put that legend to a test."

Zechs and Noin followed after her, never a word to the other. He knocked on Lady Une's door. She saluted their comrade and commander through the half-opened door, a simple Preventer's gesture. He stepped inside and took Une's unresisting hand.

"It has been a pleasure, madam," He said, pressing a sombre kiss on the back of her hand. "You are a fine woman, Lady Une."

And that was all.

Une's door swung closed slowly on their retreating backs: he picked up their jackets; she pulled out what many have come to know as her "mission bag". He collected the black files they had been reading; she went for the blues lying forgotten on someone's desk. Their own desks were pristine, their movements efficiently orchestrated. It was as if they had always planned to disappear quickly and quietly on some indeterminate day, regardless of the latest politics.

The door clicked shut.

How does one know when to step away and leave the future to those you've built it for? Une moved towards the windows and threw them wide open to let the cold, stark light of the naked February sun in.

**...**


	5. Our Distance & That Kid: Counting Teeth

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars  
**

#004 キミとボクのキョリとアノコ  
A.C. 197, February 29, 15:49: 「Counting Teeth」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

It was a simple matter to turn off elevator security in the Preventer building; it was one of Une's insistences. Sometimes one could almost forget that the proud, yet understanding, Lady Une is also Colonel Une, insidious right hand of the late Trieze Khushrenada.

"They've frozen all my assets," Noin reported with a calm that would drive most to a panicked exit.

"Take the Adler." Zechs suggested, in much the same tones. "My temporary key-codes are still active. How's the piggy-bank?"

Noin's mouth twitched. It could have been hearing him use the word 'piggy-bank', as much as anything else. Noin had always preferred 'super-secret stash fund'.

"No-one else knows of it," she replied, turning her laptop towards him, "but I wouldn't put it past Lady Une to find out."

He nodded, making mental note of the account balance on screen. He has never questioned the details regarding that sum. It was set up a long time ago and was what Noin dipped into to indulge his agendas and clean up after him; that was all he cared to know. The world needed some mysteries.

The laptop is snapped shut. The doors opened.

The hanger bay was unusually deserted, considering the time of day. "They're all upstairs, at Lady Une's debrief," Preventer Water said, standing in the afternoon light. Zechs hand went to his side-arm. Noin took a step towards her.

"Sally?"

"Don't worry, Noin, I'm just here to keep the pair of you from eloping." She replied, shaking the noble blonde braids that were the sign of her mixed heritage. "We all want to be there when the two of you are finally dragged to the altar."

"Why would we…?" "What makes you think…?"

Sally glanced from one to the other. "Aren't you?"

"No," Zechs frowned. A glimmer of amusement unfolded in Noin's eyes.

"But Relena's been planning your wedding since Christmas!"

"Noin?" Zechs turned to her, in case this was some manner of female conspiracy. She was just as bewildered as he was, although she seemed to be taking the news of their secret engagement in better humour.

Sally was still suspicious. "All this time you've known him and let him kick you out of your own bed, you weren't ever…?"

"Tell her what happened the one time you tried to kiss me, Lightning Count." Noin smiled.

"You put me in the infirmary missing an incisor and a molar, and my arm broken in three places." He remarked, clearly not as fond of the memory.

_Under a sea of stars, the little boy in the silver helmet that hid his face from the world cupped the little girl's face in his hands, delicately but firmly, like how he was taught to hold a dove. He could feel her trembling, which was normal, according to all the books and all the other boys. Girls are expected to be nervous at this point, even when they're told not to be. It is considered polite. "Noin," he whispered, his own face barely an inch from hers. "Can I be your prince?" And he kissed her, so softly that he could not be sure if he really did, or if a girl's lips were truly so sweet and soft as they say._

_The ringing blow she delivered across the underside of his exposed jaw and the salty-sweet taste overpowering the back of his throat was not described in any of the romance novels he had ever read._

"Two."

"Two breaks and a crack," he conceded, then added, "we were eleven."

"It was my first kiss!" She protested.

"It was still excessive force."

_If he had not grabbed hold of her, he might have gotten away with it. But the pride of Zechs Me… _Milliardo Peacecraft_, would not allow him to receive such a slight. He caught the closest part of her and tugged, digging his eleven year-old fingers into her ankle. "Hey!" He tried to yell at her through mouthfuls of blood and teeth. "Who the hell do you think you are?"_

"_Let go of me!" The little girl cried, stomping on his arm and showering kicks on his shiny head with deadly precision. "My prince is like the Prince of the Stars, not a metal-plated idiot like you!"_

"Sorry, Sally," Noin was genuinely apologetic as she ran towards the Adler, after Zechs. "Your bridesmaid dreams will have to wait for Relena to get Heero before the altar."

"This _is_ her plan to get Heero," Sally sighed. "It was going to be a double-wedding."

Big brother winced, hiding his face behind the space cruiser. Noin chuckled and waved her one-time partner girlishly good-bye.

"Heero Yuy is a psychopath." He told Noin firmly, strapping himself into the pilot's seat. "I was quite explicit regarding your instructions to protect Relena in my stead."

"Your sister just tried to marry us off to each other. They are well-matched," she replied unsympathetically, hooking her laptop up to the Adler's secondary and co-pilot systems. "She thinks he is her 'Prince of the Stars'. The last time I spoke to her, she wanted to know how difficult it would be to make him a Grand Duke on one of the colonies."

"Do you think Une still wants us to go on the Mars mission?" He asked instead, eyes fixed on the nose of the craft, unsullied white against a clear, silvery-blue sky, to avoid meeting hers.

A bleep from her lap demanded her immediate attention. When Noin spoke again, she sounded completely unfazed.

"Judging by this latest transaction on the stash, I'd say yes, Zechs. She's just given us the Preventers' entire stand-by budget."

"She must really like you. Whatever have you been doing for that woman, Noin?" He leered, his first schoolboy expression in far too many years.

"We're not kids anymore, Zechs." She replied with all her adult airs. "This time, if you lose your teeth, you're stuck with dentures."

**...**


	6. Dreams & Reality: Umbria, Nazo no Hako

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#006 夢と現の間  
A.C. 197, March 「Umbria」or「Nazo no Hako」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

_I knew it!_ Relena squealed inwardly, emerging triumphant from the small captain's chest Lady Une had brought over containing Milliardo Peacecraft's personal effects from his years with the Khushrenada clan.

The Preventers should have been over it with a fine-toothed comb before anyone else touched them, but being his royal sister and the ex-Queen-of-the-World accorded some privileges. From where Relena was standing, if having a chance to pry into her brother's life, however distant from the man he has become, meant jumping from the tallest building in the world without a rope, she would have done so without a second thought. In comparison, the Preventers' request that she only touch the box in the presence of two or more agents was perfectly reasonable. The only surprise was that Lady Une had not been one of them.

There had been the usual assortment of little boys' treasures: worn pebbles, broken toys, some bottle caps and feathers on bits of string, and a lilac handkerchief, still smelling faintly of lavender water and wood smoke, embroidered with the initial 'K'.

No personal letters or photographs were evident for her to imagine the child her Captain Noin had known, although there had been papers, reams of it, occupying most of the box. The bulk of it collected as an eight year-old's unfinished novel, complete with crayon illustrations. In a leather folder, she found report cards, academic and military certifications, and letters of commendations and reproof from the Lake Victoria Academy, several referencing 'bouts of savagery' with other cadets.

"…If, as guardians, you would allow cadet Merquise to continue in these bouts of regrettable savagery, then I must insist that measures be taken to ensure that he at least considers his chances of a graceful victory before engaging an opponent. I speak, in particular, of cadet Noin, with whom cadet Merquise appears to have an unhealthy rivalry…"

This letter was dated May 1st, A.C 186. Relena could not help grinning gleefully at the image of ten year-old Noin trouncing her brother around campus, even if the context confused her. It helped immensely to think that Milliardo, like her, had not been alone and unloved in their years of exile, and with that hope, she had always presumed he and Noin to have been intimate, if not the best of, friends since childhood. He certainly did not seem to have any others, and the idea that he might have being at ease with the likes of Trieze Khushrenada and Dorothy Catalonia was… disturbing, to say the least.

It was part of the reason she could not bring herself to _ask_ him about his life, despite Noin's best efforts to reintroduce the siblings to each other. Suppose things had happened to him in a way she cannot begin to relate to, how would she respond then? She had made her excuses after the second awkward brunch, telling herself and Noin with apologetic kisses that there will be time.

There hadn't.

Noin was refreshingly easy to know, if equally enigmatic. Her resume to the position of Captain of the Guard had included a short list of her preferences in food, entertainment and people, on top of the usual histories and credentials. She answered every question as plainly and concisely as she herself was, and, Relena frowned with that realisation, she never lets you notice when she wasn't.

It had been a discussion about Milliardo's alias, one rare, lazy, evening containing wine and cheese crackers. It had been easier to ask questions about him when she thought he was dead.

"Why did he call himself Zechs Merquise?"

"He never said. My guess, he thought he was being clever," Noin chuckled, shifting the girl's head to a more comfortable position in her lap. "Before Sanq went pacifist, it kept a knighthood instead of a military, pretty much the same thing though, with fancier ranks. And all the best knights were made marquess."

"So, Six Marquess? What does that mean?"

"I don't know, princess, although I'm surprised nobody questioned it at enrolment. It's a terrible moniker."

"Then they should pull up on names like Noin, too," Relena pointed out with an instinctual jump to her brother's defence. "It sounds like nine in German, which would seem a fairly odd thing to be named, too."

"I suppose it is," the older woman smiled and poured her more wine. "It's a good thing you weren't a Specials enrolment officer in 185."

She hadn't given the comment much thought then, but if Milliardo Peacecraft could go through his entire high-profile military career under an assumed name, why couldn't anyone else?

And now, she may be holding a very important clue as to who the woman she had privately thought of as her sister-in-law was.

It was a parchment a foot by two in size; a marriage contract witnessed by six seals, the bedraggled survivor, from the look of things, of war, fire and water. All the gold leaf and most of the wax had run and rubbed away and someone had fed the greater part of upper right hand corner inexpertly to a candle before they were stopped, or had changed their mind. The resulting damage left an incomplete name, but it was a start.

"Hey, Sally?" She called out to one of the Preventers Une had left behind. "Did you know my brother was married?"

**...**

.

**Glossary:**  
_Nazo no Hako_ - Japanese "Box of Mystery"


	7. Superstar: Secrets and Small Things

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#007 スーパースター  
A.C. 197, March 「Secrets and Small Things」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

"I won't keep running away, Zechs… I'm not like you."

It began, like a number of awkward moments throughout space and time, with several bottles of hard liquor and an existential crisis. They have been down this path before and will find themselves back here time and again, in whatever other corners of the big, wide, universe they happened to be haunting then, right up 'til the day they die. That would be a fine ending, too.

His hunt for a decent beverage led them through every bar and shop in four-fifths of the colony cluster they had picked to lay low and regroup in. Their options were fairly limited, to be honest. The earth and all of L-1 and L-2 were crawling with ambitions eager to ingratiate themselves to the Earth Sphere United Nation administration at their expense, although it was his sister Relena's agents that they were most wary of. Since faithful Quatre was on X-18999 in the L-3 sector with his private army, it came down to being spotted by the largely sociopathic Wufei, or one of the twenty-nine other, female, Winner progenies.

They went with the L-4 colonies only because the Winner women were far likelier to want them sound and hale. What was it that Sally Po had said? _"We all want to be there when the two of you are finally dragged to the altar."_ Noin was not sure if 'we' included the Chinaman, but given that neither parties were required to be alive for a wedding in his culture, it seemed better to avoid that situation altogether.

The first three bottles disappeared into quietly measured shots. The next two they divided and chugged without bothering with the glasses. By bottles number six and seven, the tall young man with the hair of angels and his porcelain-and-ebony companion were the only customers left in Nafi's Dada Den of Delights, much to Nafi's distress, because that was when the conversation started.

"What do you think she'll do to us if we don't take the mission?"

"Use your imagination. Why would anyone think Dadaism a delightful anything?"

"It's an anti-war anti-art, sounds good in theory." Zechs shrugged, passing the bottle. "What does she expect us to do? Revive the Martian civilisation and lead them to war against the evil, invading corporations?"

"Funny that doesn't sound half as crazy as it should," Noin took a swig, "but since the rumours of intelligent life up there were debunked, we're probably out of luck on those indigenous reinforcements. Seriously? You think there's some merit to that nonsense?"

"I didn't say that. If it bothers you that much, we don't have to stay…"

"Yes, we do." She hefted the half-bottle of deep amber firewater mournfully. "They've got Wild Turkey."

"Point taken," he pulled another from the crate under their table. The problem was local law, which prohibited the consumption of alcohol outside licensed locations, and they were neither drunk nor desperate enough to risk that sort of attention yet. "Do you think anyone recognised us?"

"A bit late for that, isn't it? Mr. Commander-in-Chief of White Fang."

It was, in actual fact, the reason they were left to themselves so quickly.

He groaned.

"How are we expected to infiltrate anything with our faces plastered over the news?"

"Actually, that's all you. In case you haven't noticed, you've been something of an anti-celebrity ever since you single-handedly declared war on Earth. Other than that, we're being swept under the carpet as a matter of grave embarrassment while they think of new ways to bring the galaxy to heel."

"Different verse, same song." Zechs muttered into his drink. "Just like those bastards on the Earth Sphere Alliance council."

It was Noin's turn to shrug. The prince can be surprisingly simple about politics and the whole happy caboodle of song and dance that came with it, sometimes, a trait that Trieze Khushrenada encouraged in his colleagues from time to time. Fortunately, perhaps regrettably, he had never considered her to be one of them.

Sometimes, she shuddered to imagine the plans the late leader of OZ must have had for Milliardo Peacecraft and his Kingdom of Sanq. Sometimes, she merely wondered what went through the man's mind whenever he looked at her.

"Maybe I should get another mask."

"That would be a shame. I was getting used to drinking to an actual human being instead of a shiny metal plate."

"I could get it in leather," he offered with Turkey number nine. "Hell, you could get one too. Forget espionage, we'll go out there and build an alien, masked, civilisation. We'd be gods. You can be the Goddess of Secrets, and small things, like paperclips and chess pieces."

"'Small things'? Is that what you call the paperclip that has saved your dignity dozens of times? What would people say if they were ever to find out how often the great Lightning Count used to lose his keys?"

"Fine, be the Goddess of Whips and Chains, if you prefer."

He chuckled wearily. She sputtered and turned bright red.

"That was one time, one time! And you came to me!" She hissed.

"How about we just go to ground?" He buried his face in his arms with a sigh. "MO-five or further out, where we never have to hear about any of this again. It worked pretty well for me the last time."

Noin gave him a sharp look of the kind that usually meant he was in for an ass kicking, when they were children.

"I won't keep running away, Zechs… I'm not like you. Besides, if we leave things as they are now, this peace will fall apart before Relena even turns twenty and the sacrifices we've made would have been for nothing."

"So what do you propose we do? You said it yourself, everyone knows who I am, and damned if I'm going to let you waltz back into that den of vipers on your own!"

He glared, watching her for signs of mental instability as she focused unnecessarily hard on her drink.

"Become a superstar." She met his eyes and concluded with a dangerous grin.

An elegant golden eyebrow shot up.

"You're kidding."

"No. Since everyone knows who you are, let's play it up. A resume like yours and a few well-placed words, we could get our pick of mercenary work with just a few jobs to build our reputation."

"Why would I want to do that?" He asked, unhappy with the implications of involving himself in any sort of social dealings.

"Because," she replied patiently, "we can't live off of the stash forever and you don't have any better ideas."

"I like the nation of aliens plan," he was quite forlorn. "It would have made you a goddess."

She ignored him. "With conditions as they are with the Project, it won't be long before one or more of the companies put out for bodies to safeguard their interests against everyone else. That's our ticket in."

"And because in return, you are going to wear a dress and sing for me."

"What?"

"Love songs. At a retro theme pub of some sort, I think."

"You can't be that drunk already!" She gasped aghast, snatching an empty bottle from his end of the table to sniff for suspicious content.

"I'm not. I'll need a contact on the ground when I'm out there shooting down the ruffians of the galaxy, an information liaison, mission control. Also, to make up for defeating me with your incredibly depressing but astute world view."

"You're courting a kiss of death, Merquise."

"I've heard it said you would do anything for me, Noin," he smiled sickly sweetly. "Whatever happened to that bright-eyed girl who served unquestioningly by my side the last two years?"

"She thought you were going to die."

"Every moment, for two years? That's impossible. Did I have 'death-wish' written on my back?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Hn." He regarded her thoughtfully. "I think I liked you better when you thought I was going to die."

"Yes," she agreed, reaching over to tug on his hair. "I think I liked you better then too."

**...**


	8. Seeping: Februus, Kisaragi no Shinigami

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#027 零れる  
A.C. 197, April 「Februus」or「Kisaragi no Shinigami 」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

Some days, Zechs can barely bring himself to look at Noin. On others, he can hardly bare to let her out of his sight. There was plenty of normality in between, too, though he could never tell what the day was going to be until he actually saw her. It got worse with each death, each loyal man shot down whom he was responsible for, and the worst of it was, he would never be able to tell anyone about it, not as long as he lived and Milliardo Peacecraft did not.

She was spread out on the couch in little more than a tank top and a pair of shorts when he came in. He held his breath and waited for the steady rise and fall of her chest before turning away, relieved. Sometimes, he would find himself out of bed, gripped in some unnamed terror in the middle of the night, and creep beside her just to watch her breathe. She always seemed too quiet in her sleep, too still. Sometimes, he fancied that she did not sleep, only fall into a little death now and again, to be resurrected when she wakened.

Last night, he saw her standing at the foot of his bed, with the moon in her eyes and a clouded expression on her cold, passive, face. When he tried to sit up in bed, she vanished, and he was too horrified to check in her room.

He said nothing to the cheerfully animated young woman, so different from his midnight visitor, at breakfast. It couldn't have been her. She was his light, his shadow. Maybe he was losing his mind. Maybe the carefree persona pouring him coffee and orange juice was a lie. Maybe, he thought, studying her silhouette, _she has finally found him out_.

Once upon a time, a girl told a boy that he could talk to her about anything, so he did. He told her about the life he has lost and the people he has killed, about the men with whom he'd schemed, and the girls with whom he'd loved. He told her everything, every secret, every sin, save the worst one of all.

Some nights, he dreams of his own murder, always at her hands, those lovely, delicate, hands. In his favourite death, she holds him beneath a lazurite sea and wrings the life out of him before he drowns, wearing bone-white kid leather gloves and a matching summer dress strewn with seed pearls and crystal chips. Like a _hrímthurs_ rising from the rime, she is beautiful, and so at peace, as he wakes and dies.

She should have killed him long ago, that summer in Italy. She could have killed him in any number of ways when he pulled her out of the twisted metal that had been the ejected safety pod of a self-destructing prototype MS. She had been furious, and screaming in German. He recognised her voice and words from shouting matches at the Academy before receiving a visual from his Leo's exterior monitors.

Shock, and the irrational panic that no one else must discover the enemy pilot's identity, made him abandon all caution. He powered down his suit and slipped from the safety of his cockpit into the salty sea breeze. She had paused, equally stunned to see him as he reached into the wreckage and hauled her up by the arms, and started again in English, kicking and gnashing for all she was worth.

"Let me go, Milliardo Peacecraft!" She screamed before he could form a coherent thought. "Let me go! Are you happy now? Look at that! Look!"

The faint thunder of combat pounded to be let inside his head from a distance, and the acrid taste of gunpowder smoke in the back of his throat made him sick. The bloody, soot-stained face was one he had last seen a scant three months ago in Africa, pouring over final preparations for their first internship assignments, debating extra socks. He refused to acknowledge memories of the fight they'd had later that evening, as she helped him with an overdue assignment on the History of Unified Earth. The words are still branded on his tongue:

"If one cannot do battle for the fallen, whose beliefs they've shared, then they have as good as turned their backs on them; and if they do not share the same visions as their allies and leaders, then the leaders must execute these worms themselves, as hypocrites and traitors to their service."

"There is more than one way to defend an ideal," she had said, thoughtfully, "and many concerns of greater consequence than vengeance. What worth is a life thrown too hastily away? A massacre does no one any good."

He had called her weak, and foolish, naïve. She had picked up her things and informed him that in that case, he can finish the essay by himself. He never did. What could she possibly know of the reality of history? She was an honour student, daughter of a common mechanic whose only brush with the ruling caste had been to service Baron Yurendei's yacht one autumn twenty years ago, whereas he was a Prince of the noble lineage of Sanq, an unfortunate survivor of history. He has stood in the ashes and watched a circle of old men, sworn to protect and serve his dead father, divvy up the salvage from his broken home and go their separate ways. He has seen the guilt in their eyes, the look that wished he and his sister had not survived. He committed all their faces to memory.

That was why he had begged to be allowed to fly on the mission, even though interns were strictly classified as non-combat personnel. One of them had been the target, the Marchese di Luculo of Venezia. And if he'd killed the man in defiance of the capture order, his commander chalked it up to over-enthusiasm and privately mused over what might have passed between the boy and the Marchese. Still, the mission had been ultimately successful and he thought no more of it.

Later, the cadet will be clapped on the back by the older pilots and told that the Marchese was wanted on suspicions of aiding and sheltering dissidents, in particular, the missing Peacecraft siblings. He was lucky that the charred body of the boy had been discovered in amongst the family, albeit recognisable only by the royal signet ring he'd carried on his person, or there would have been hell to pay for letting the prince of Sanq escape. He broke away from their well-meaning camaraderie and threw up.

"_Is that the glorious stand you wanted? It is nothing but death and fire!"_

Later, he will be sorry. She will tell him, years after, of how she had climbed into her grandfather's Mobile Suit, a relic from his old days of service to Sanq, to fight off the descending OZ Leos, and how her mother forced a remote override to send her to safety. With only head-sized debris and cadet Merquise's account of the Svala unit's explosion, the United Earth Sphere Alliance will presume the mystery pilot, identified in battle as Alessandra di Luculo, the Marchese's reclusive youngest daughter, deceased.

At that moment, however, on those shores, all he knew was her screaming his name. How does… how long has she… why? Snippets of history came to mind, a knighthood in Mobile Suits disbanded for his father's dreams of a pacifist future, a little girl at his fourth birthday party, a circle of old men poking about a ruined palace, whispering regrets and tears unshed.

"You bastard, Peacecraft! Let me go —Kill me here or let me go to my family!"

He pushed her from him and struck her for silence so that he can think, a rousing blow that barks worse than it bites. She reeled, stumbled two steps and spat on him. The spittle clung to his helm like a see-through slug. She was horrified. He removed the mask, and they stared at each other through the things unsaid.

"Assurer maintenant, Svala," he said softly, steady now, steady.

"Capisco, maestà." She replied in Italian and dropped her gaze.

"Non," he held out a hand to her, entranced in the gesture. "Je ne suis pas le Roi pourtant."

She kissed his fingers, in the fashion of royalty, then sank to her knees and cried.

"You're lucky I'm not kitted out with surveillance devices, idiot." Masking his awkwardness with dry sarcasm, he kneels on one knee beside her and comforted her against his shoulder.

Once she had cried her heart out and there were no more tears to be shed, she held her head high and looked him squarely in the eye.

"You are Luciano's sister." He pulled himself a little straighter to meet that look. Luciano was a young noble at the Sanq court, the prince's chess tutor.

"Yes."

"You used a false identity to get into Lake Victoria, I presume so you can get to me. Why?"

"I was sent to watch over you, sir. I was the only one of the appropriate age."

Her expression was bland, unreadable. He pursed his lips and frowned. It was not inconceivable that someone watching over his interests would distrust his guardian enough to introduce their own agents into the mix. To think it would be Noin though, who had always appeared to wear her heart on her sleeves, boggled his mind.

"You should be on X-18999. What happened?"

"Terrorists tried to nix the command centre. We were given a month of recovery so the parents don't sue for endangerment. Reassignments will be handed out next week." Has she always sounded so… dead?

He wanted desperately to apologise, but the words taste like ash, meaningless and hollow, so he swallowed them instead.

"I should get back. Will you be alright?"

She nodded numbly.

"What will you do, Noin?" Surely he couldn't just leave her here.

"I don't know, Zechs." Her calmness chilled him. "Go back to school, I guess."

He cleaned his mask off and put it back on, unsure of what else to say.

"Well, take care of yourself then. I'll see you back at the school."

.

One day, he will take her back to that April coastline, where a patch of burnt grass still remains on the spot he had found her, like a crudely wrapped present from above, and he will tell her the truth of what he had done that summer. She will study him, her head cocked to one side, just so, and ask, "Is this why you would not let me stay by your side?"

She will utter the words he had feared for a lifetime, that she had always known, had recognised him from his movements when he struck her father down. Only then will she look out over the sparkling sea and say to him, slowly, proudly, "my parents lost their lives because they failed to serve you the way you wished to be served. We are knights of the Order of the Thorn, Highness, our lives are yours whether you like it or not, your shield and your sword, to be wielded as you deem fit. That is _our_ choice. You owe us nothing for it."

And as he starts to cry, a grown man crushed under the shame and love of those deaths, and many others, she will tell him that they forgive him and were sorry they could not do better by him. "I am ready. Strike me now for the wrongs I've done, I will not fight back." He replied, choking back his tears. He will offer her a rapier, which he has brought under his coat in preparation for this moment. "Do it, but please tell no-one why."

Here, things will come full circle to a fitting end.

She will take the weapon, and she will laugh. "Zechs. Zechs, you melodramatic, puffed-up, self-important…" She chants bitterly, stabbing angrily at the tall grass at the edge of the cliff with each syllable.

"Fool!" She cries, whirling around to face him. The tip of his foil kisses his bare chest, under the hollow of his throat, between the dip of his collarbones, before sailing through the air behind her. "Do you think I would have let you walk away back then if this was what I'd wanted? What does it take for you to get it? _I forgive you, Zechs Merquise_, I forgave you nine years ago to the day, for everything you might ever do, right here on this spot!"

She is every bit as dramatic and tearful as he is, and for an instant he thinks she might kiss him and make love to him right there.

She doesn't.

Instead, he asks her politely to return his ancestral ceremonial sword, at which point she will blush, clapping her hands to her mouth and confess in a horrified whisper that she must have thrown it over the cliffs, and they will skid down its slopes and spend the rest of the afternoon running hysterically along the rocks and the edge of the sea, until they find it amongst the shore debris again.

**...**

.

**Glossary:**  
_Kisaragi no Shinigami - Japanese "February's Death God"  
__hrímthurs_ - Nordic "Frost Maiden", or "Frost Giant"  
_Assurer maintenant_ - French "Steady now"  
_Capisco, maestà_ - Italian "Understood, majesty"  
_Non. Je ne suis pas le Roi pourtant_ - French "No. I am not King yet"

**A/N:**  
Februus is the Italian God of Death and Rebirth, after whom February is thought to be named. It's also my idea of when Zechs was born, if you check back to the one about his birthday. He's always struck me as one of those mysterious Aquarius boys.


	9. Cassette: Lilacs Out of the Dead Land

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#014 ラジカセ  
A.C. 197, April 22:「Lilacs Out of the Dead Land」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

There was a brief moment of panic before he found the note and the nondescript box that went with it, when he woke up alone in what passed for their apartment.

"Good morning, your Illustriousness," it read, and he smiled at her good-natured sarcasm. It was a few minutes past noon. "Brunch is in the oven and the coffee's in the machine, just turn it on." He discovered both exactly as she'd said and wondered what the occasion was that warranted French toast and Denver omelette. The coffee machine made ominous sounds to the next lines, "Treize left something for you the year before last."

A chill slid down Zechs' stomach. The year before last, the revolution, the Eve War, O.Z. These were things he was not yet ready to think about.

"He was very specific that you only receive it on April twenty-second A.C. 197. I hope, whatever it is, it's something you've been looking for." He caught himself imagining that delivering their late commander's package was the only reason she had insisted on dogging his every step since Christmas. Noin may not have trusted the man, she certainly did not like him, but she would have done anything within her power to complete what has been entrusted to her. She was dependable like that.

A peek in the medicine cabinet calmed him. She wouldn't have taken off without her toothbrush. She was also fastidious like that. The package explained her offerings in comfort food, though not why he should be one to receive such a thing.

Treize Khushrenada was many things to many people: inspiration, pariah, military genius, dictator; if one were to combine all his facets, one would still not be able to tell who or what he truly was. Zechs, like Noin, had no deep love for him. They had shared some commonality in goals and social standing. The rest, as far as Zechs was concerned, had died with him, without remorse.

Some live in the belief that the world that has survived his war was his true intention all along, others celebrate his demise as the end of martial coercion and the business of war. The precious few who know both these to be wrong also knew enough of him to say nothing. There were no words on his headstone, because he did not want any.

Which made his current gesture all the odder. He had left Zechs a mini cassette player, the kind he used to hide under his desks for reviewing private conversations. The first voice on the tape was aged and venomous. "I'm watching you, boy," it snarled, "Do not think I have forgotten where your father's sympathies laid!"

The answering voice, silky smooth and velvet-rich, put a lump in Zechs' chest. "Then it may also please you to remember, Uncle, that Marquis Khushrenada is dead and I am hardly my father's favourite child." The Duke's response was cut off by a length of white noise.

_Ah, Treize_. It was a mistake to think he could listen to that voice and eat. Zechs put down his fork and rested his aristocratic nose against crossed fingers, waiting for the dead man to explain himself.

"Do excuse the guileful censorship, I do not wish to be remembered by my uncle's ungracious language." He was speaking directly to him now, against an oddly familiar hush in the background. It took several minutes for Zechs to realise what it was. It was the kind of silence that characterised the tapes they used to make as children, telling stories around torchlight campfires under heavy duvet tents.

"My friend, to borrow a phrase from Lucrezia, it's been five years, eleven months and twenty-nine days. I hold no delusions that the place we sat and became brothers again in is still standing; my faith goes instead towards the restoration of our proud Empire of Sanq. I have no doubt that you are a fine Duke, or whatever it is you are pretending to be instead of King, as I have no doubt that your little trachelium would have seen to that you are alive today, survivor of our shared lunacy."

The tall blond winced and almost turned off the player. Lunacy. The word struck him deeper and crueller than the mention of Sanq or the verbal liberties taken with Noin. Even beyond the grave, Treize had a way of getting under his skin.

The worst of it was that it wasn't untrue, and if Treize had been standing across from him today, Zechs would have charged him with the same. Lunacy. How else to describe the man's drunken recital of the entire final act to a classic tragedy at a military bar, and what transpired in the wake of that particular hangover? He smiled at the memory. It had been a flawless delivery until Treize fell back into his barstool in an emotional stupor, some twenty lines from the conclusion.

He laughed light-headedly at his audience, unsure if they had ever heard Shakespeare in their lifetimes. If he was honest with himself, he would admit that they were only waiting for him to buy them another round or do something slapstick, like fall flat on his face.

"_See, what a scourge is laid upon your hate_,  
_That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love_."  
Misery loves company. Through the many years that followed, Zechs could think of no other reasons that he might have called the Lieutenant's attention to himself that night. He had been pleasantly inebriated in a cocktail of crude whiskey and teenaged familial angst, and the words of a fictional Italian Prince seemed all too apt.  
"_And I for winking at your discords too  
__Have lost a brace of kinsmen; all are punish'd._"

There were no scenes of sudden recognition, Lieutenant Khushrenada knew exactly who Zechs Merquise was when he was assigned to his command eight weeks ago —the boy had lived in his father's house and eaten at his table as one of his children for six years, after all— He was awake the night his father brought the renegade prince home and tucked him into the other side of his bed. He was there when the younger boy fell off his first pony and won his first fencing match. He had made the pens himself, that their fathers used to sign the contract that would have forever tied their Houses together in marriage, had history unfolded some other way.

It did not, and it had been three years since either had acknowledged the other in any capacity outside soldiers of the OZ. Had it not been an evening of such sorrow and loss, they might never have spoken of their shared history again. But his father and sisters were lost to him, and now, his beloved and child. That night, more than any other, he did not want to be alone in the world, without a friend.

"_O brother Montague, give me thy hand;  
This is my daughter's jointure, for no more  
Can I demand.  
But I can give thee more;  
For I will raise her statue in pure gold;  
That while Verona by that name is known,  
There shall no figure at such rate be set  
__As that of true and faithful…_"

Treize had promised him the world, or, at least, all the world that mattered. Milliardo Peacecraft's Sanq Kingdom was a Pacifist Nation, not the coveted seat of power on the European continent. The Marquis was vigilant in teaching his children the correct history of the world, laying plain the many inevitable villainies of the ages. Zechs could care less for the deeds of dead men. He preferred to remember his father as the firm, compassionate, man whose influence over his neighbours was won through wisdom and respect, not as the reformed heir of warlords and tyrants. For Treize, however, it became the world he saw when he looked in every ballroom and council hall, a game of musical chairs played to violence and strife. It fascinated him in its unchoreographed grace and vitality.

Zechs never learnt Treize's intentions in overthrowing the United Earth Sphere Alliance, nor did he care to. It was easier to regard the Aryan's goals as world domination because he had been taught all about overreaching ambitions and knew how to deal with them. Zechs preferred his world simple.

Treize was true to his word. The world remembers Sanq Kingdom as Zechs Merquise does, the lone voice on Earth speaking out against the prevailing corporation whose main business was war. Forgotten were the days when Sanq's armies marched across the Mediterranean in the shadow of her power-armoured Knights. Forgotten was the fear and awe once evoked by the mere whisper of their name. The world remembers, instead, Relena Peacecraft, who was, for two momentous weeks, the Queen of the World, a captive who refused to be hostage.

It was not enough.

Noin had tried to warn him, and, much as the last King had refused reason from his Knight-Commander over the demilitarisation of his kingdom, Zechs would not listen. Casting his lot in with Treize was the best chance he saw of claiming his vengeance, something he did not expect, and would not accept, that she'd understand. It was worth every future he had thrown at it except, he came to realise, Relena's. Without her to carry on, history would be nothing more than a story.

He listened to Treize reminisce for hours, reliving the stories of boys' games on palace lawns and dragon quests in secret gardens, carefully avoiding talk of their families and sacrifices. He remembered, as Treize spoke, of the lies they have told and servants they have tormented, and of places they had known and things they have seen, and he knew, as each word was formed, that he will miss the part of him that was forever buried with the man who reminded him of lilacs.

"This is the last time I will be able to speak to you freely, so I have saved my sins for the end. You do not need my explanations, and I will not burden you with them. I leave you, in its place, my apologies and a cowardly admission of guilt from far beyond your reach. I was never a brave man, brother, do not let them remember me that way.

"If you have met the ravenous Fenrir then you must know the poor fate I have written you and your sister in my opera. It was I who set them on you, although I confess I had expected you to slay the beast our King's ideals created, not become it…" The proud strategist chuckled, conjuring the content image of his chiselled features with its distinctive brows, enthralled in the transient bliss of fine wine and opera. That is how Zechs will always see him, immaculately groomed, never a hair out of place.

"I am not ashamed, only disappointed that I had not discovered your sister sooner. She is fast replacing you as the _prima donna_ in my affectations with her astonishing propensity to blossom under adversity. Were the circumstances to arise, I would inflict upon her the same, without hesitation, if merely to watch her splendours unfold. I send her to you in anticipation of your duet.

"Milliardo, I am not my father's favourite child: that was you. Even as I pen speeches of peace for the world and seal my final instructions to Lady Une, I do not believe in the dream. All I can lay claim to is an incompetent father's wish for a world in which he could just once kiss his only child goodnight. One day, perhaps, you will understand."

His ending was abrupt, albeit lyrical and well-spoken, mirroring himself, the gentleman orator who had never learnt to properly say good-bye.

And curiously, even though nothing has changed and he neither trusted nor liked the man any more than he had when he went to bed the night before, Zechs replayed his tape from the beginning and mourned the death of his friend.

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
Melodramatic verses quoted from Shakespeare's _Romeo and Juliet_ without permission._ 'Twas in another country, and besides, the wretch is dead._  
One more Zechs-is-a-verbose-sensitive-soul-with-too-many-things-eating-him-up-inside shot and we can move on to more Zechs-and-Noin-trip-over-their-own-feet-to-uselessly-catch-each-other's-attention shots.


	10. Cradle: Tigna Tinia, Akuryou Ato no Kimi

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#022 揺り籠  
A.C. 197, April 30 「Tigna←Tinia」or「Akuryou Ato no Kimi」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

She'd done it. She'd gotten them a job with the most questionable of corporations bidding for majority on the Mars Project, just as she'd said she would. It took all of his presence of mind to smile at her news and be pleased. A treacherous voice in his head grumbled that if she hadn't pulled him off the transport those months ago, he would already be on the red planet. It wasn't that he was unhappy about the arrangements, and it certainly couldn't be that he resented her for putting it together… could it?

Zechs had always been the one with the big ideas and dramatic plans, and Noin had always been the one to hold his hair back as he threw up or stitched himself back together the morning after. That was who they were, the touchstone of their tenuous relationship. It was easier to think that way, even when he knows it not to be true. They've lived too long in the lie, and any deception carried long enough starts to feel like the truth. It was disconcerting to be reminded of what she really was, though more so for him that he would need reminding.

She was the one who held back so that he would always come out on top. Whenever he was stuck for a strategy or at a loss for answers, she was there, having already anticipated his needs; granted, she hadn't always been nice about it. He'd sooner forget that there was ever a time when they were younger than twelve.

The Noin he prefers to remember was a solemn, silent creature who locked herself away in her dorm for six weeks following the class' return from Practical Field Assignment. Their instructors assumed it to be a harmless bout of depression triggered by the guilt from Sergeant Khushrenada's injury on X18999, not uncommon, especially considering the dashing young officer's popularity. Young Zechs had not been so sure. To be fair, he had a better idea of what was wrong.

It was his first time venturing within the perimeters of a lady's boudoir, and he has since learnt more charming ways of gaining access than attempting to kick their doors down in steel-toed boots at study-hour. The prefects arrived when he lost his temper armed with the assortment of profanities he had picked up from Hans Werden. The next day, he returned with a craftily stolen master key. She opened the door before he had had a chance to use it.

"What do you want." She stated more than asked, heading, mostly oozing, back towards the bed against the eastern wall. It was the most dishevelled he has seen her, save the time he walked in on her and Michelangelo the Mechanic at her fifteenth birthday party, which was also one of those things too uncomfortable for him to recall.

"The Principles of Astrophysics test is Monday," he followed her in, shutting the door behind him out of habit and finding himself trapped in the darkness, afraid to move in case he stepped on something. "It's forty-percent of the overall grade and even if you don't care about it, I do."

"So what?" There was an inflection in her tone this time, which was encouraging, although her climbing back under the covers wasn't.

"So… I need a study partner," he shuffled his weight around uncomfortably. "To come to the library and help me study."

"Instructor Petz can requisition you a new one," she mumbled without any of her usual vitality. "I'm sick."

"Oh, come on! You know I'll flunk without you, nobody else even knows what the hell they're answering half the time!"

The words slipped right out and he bit down on his tongue too late. Her silence reared its head and roared deafeningly in his ears. "Go away," it seemed to whisper. "Get out, while you can." He stayed put, petrified.

Several minutes passed. Then, a shuddering, long-suffering breath. "Pull," was her quiet advice, "not push."

It might have been romantic to imagine it was something in her voice, or the haunting familiarity of the situation that made his heart go out to her. The piles of things that were picked up and then strewn randomly across the floor for not providing enough distraction, the way she trotted through the halls between periods, eyes cast down, avoiding all presence of other life, the sordid atmosphere of a heart-sick room… it was, in fact, the lack of mouldering food. He couldn't recall the last time he had seen her eat around the Academy. He had hoped she was getting fed elsewhere.

When he had been laid up like this, there were always servants around to push open the curtains in the morning and leave fragrant tidbits lying within range of his featherbed fortress. There had been Treize, marching in every day during school holidays that year to see if he could please have his bed back, and his elder sister Anatolie, who moved all her lessons into Treize's room and made a point of asking his opinion on subjects from Classical Poetry to ladies fencing until he'd finally cracked.

The Astrophysics test was two days away. Zechs did not have that much time. He crossed the cave-like room in four purposeful strides and unceremoniously whipped the linen cocoon of her bedthings off the bed.

"Noin, Cadet, look at me!" He grabbed her upper arm angrily as she curled tighter in on herself, facing away. "Cadet, when was the last time you had a good meal?"

It was more awkward than he had imagined to actually wrestle her around enough to sit up. The first thing she noticed was his crude, face-obscuring helmet hanging off her bedpost.

"Idiot!" She hissed, quick as a flash. "What if someone'd walked in and recognised you?"

There was some sort of irony at play here that they will come to appreciate later, when they were done being disgusted at each other. He caught her other arm as she reached for his mask. Holding both wrists in a hand that had grown alarmingly large over the summer, he seized her chin with his free hand, inspected her pale, listless, face as though he knew what he was looking for, and let go roughly with a light push. She pushed back.

"What's the matter, Cadet, you push like a girl!" He taunted.

"What's wrong, Peacecraft," she replied in an equally harsh whisper. "Don't like what you see?"

If she saw him flinch, she was hurting too much to care. He lashed out at her. She parried and made a grab for his collar with only a shadow of her former fighting grace. He ducked out of the way and took a step back.

"That was laughable, Cadet, grown all soft and girly over the summer?"

She lunged for his throat with a frustrated growl and knocked the wind out of him with a well-placed shove of her shoulders when he tried to side-step her. He was flat out on his back in under thirty seconds, dazedly wondering if it was a new school record. She threw her weight across his chest and would have taken his eye out on the follow through had she not caught herself.

"_Mio Dio_…" she gasped, horrified.

"Well," he coughed, struggling for breath, "it got you out of bed. Now, about that test… but some real food for you first, I think. You've definitely lost weight since the last time we've been in this position."

Regular, ten, eleven year-old Noin would have slugged him one and put him in his place. Twelve year-old Noin turned bright red in chagrin and pulled him to his feet amidst the jumble of her discarded books and clothes, then dropped to a knee and a fist, mumbling apologies to 'your Majesty'.

"I told you," he said into the darkness, "I'm not King yet."

"Highness, then."

He sighed. "What should I call you?"

"Anything that pleases your Highness."

There was a time when the boy would have milked it for all it was worth, but that boy was dead, killed by his own hand on a lazurite blue coast near Venezia. Prince Milliardo Peacecraft, heir to the throne of Sanq, rubbed the right of his neck wearily and extended his left hand to his last loyal subject.

"So, Noin. You didn't answer my question. When was the last time you've had anything besides," he made a face at the thought, "cafeteria soup?"

Loss is a terrifying thing, more frightful than death, at some ages. More tangible. The only defence two children alone in the dark had against it was the hand each gripped clumsily in their own, and the unspoken promise to not let go.

She was never quite the same afterwards, and neither was he. It was the last time she ever beat him at physical combat, which was fine, because that was something he'd always thought he could do without.

The hallway war between the girls and the boys quickly fell into obscurity without their respective ringleaders. Zechs stopped wearing the beat-up metal helm that was his 'cousin' Treize's symbol of office as past Class President. Noin took up every extra credit assignment she could and withdrew into her studies. Other than that early October weekend where he'd publicly bribed her with all manners of choice morsels from the cafeteria for her help in a Principles of Astrophysics exam, they were hardly seen in the same room outside weekday study periods again. For a whole term, the Chief Instructor's disciplinary lecture featured the phrase "time to grow up, like Cadets Merquise and Noin".

It was no surprise when they graduated first and second of the class. Noin's instructors were only a little disappointed, in that they were convinced she could have beaten Cadet Merquise for the higher ranking if she hadn't been spread so thin over her electives. Nonetheless, they told her encouragingly, there was plenty of time to make up for it in service.

No, he did not remember the girl who used to stroll, bold and natural as she pleased, into the boys' shower whenever the girls took too long in theirs; the same girl who had declared the trophy helm once awarded to Treize Khushrenada, Honour Student and President of the Academy Class of A.C. 184, to be tawdry and out of style, and proceeded to tease and plague the boy who had, receiving it as a going-away present from his 'cousin', refused to take it off in a true hero-worship fanaticism. The other boys had made him their leader by virtue of that very shiny and symbolic headpiece, and he wasn't about to let her get away with tarnishing its significance.

The lines were quickly drawn, with the female students protesting his arbitrary supremacy and somehow pushing the little purple-eyed firecracker forward as their champion. No one will admit, in the years to come, that it had began with the boys' efforts to fend off her brazen invasion into their territories. All that will be remembered is that she had called him developmentally arrested, and he had called her a penis-envying suffragette. Not that either, in point of fact, understood what the words had meant. It was simply something cool and sophisticated they'd heard to insult someone with. They also hadn't been very clear on the definition of 'sophisticated'.

More and more, that girl was starting to come back on the edges of Noin's laughter and in the sparkle in her eyes. He was glad for her, and worried at the same time. Ten year-old Noin had not been overtly fond of him. Did twenty year-old Noin like her? He wondered. He had. He was not so confident that he would, still. He had grown so used to her second fiddle.

There were other things too. Her rock steady calm, her shy "I told you so" smile, the way she spoke to him with only her eyes. Little things. He liked how he could read her every move and thought, how he had never had to question if she will be at the right place at the right time, or invent new and interesting things to say to her. Lucrezia Noin, the one he was accustomed to, did not need any impressing.

He had to laugh at himself, then. It wasn't to do with her after all. _Performance anxieties!_ He had forgotten that gnawing, nagging, urge to outdo her at every turn.

With renewed humour, he dared turn his attention from the washing-up to pick her up and spin her around a little before stealing a peck on her cheek.

"That's great news, Noin. I've never doubted you, not even for a second."

"Not even a second, huh? Funny, I don't like that tone." She regarded him suspiciously, homing right in on the bravado.

Zechs Merquise, afraid of a little competition? Ludicrous. Even if it is from a woman who was once a little girl who could hand him his ass on a platter.

**…**

.

**Glossary**:  
_Akuryou Ato no Kimi_ – Japanese "_you who are descended from evil spirits_" or "_you (who stands) behind evil spirits_" deliberately ambiguous.  
_Mio Dio_ – Italian "_My God_", as in "oh my god"

**A/N:  
_Tinia_**, the Bright Sky God is the Etruscan High God (who upholds the sacred inviolability of boundaries) who was reinvented after the fall of Etruria as _**Tigna**_ (apparently Italian for _ringworm_), an evil spirit who brings lightning, hail and rain, and mildew.

**This Fanon's Background-check**: The remembered scene references the one in _Februus_, in which Zechs pretty much kills Noin's family out of spite in the Spring of 188. Also references Zechs' early relationship with Treize in the Khushrenada home.


	11. High Spirits: Capable of Trouble

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#012 ゴキゲン  
A.C. 197, May 3, 11:55am 「Capable of Trouble」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

All security teams attached to the Megmillion Mars expedition were comprised of three members: two Mobile Suit pilots and a dedicated mechanic. Zechs hated theirs on sight, feelings that were fully justified when Noin, coming up to join him on the ship's MS hanger, squealed in delight and flew into his arms.

"Donn! Are you our mechanic? Oh my god, you look great!"

"Lucrezia? What a surprise!" The other man beamed, crushing her too amicably to his broad chest. Zechs folded his arms and thought longingly of his mask. In the old days, he could have scowled and glowered however much he liked and not get caught.

"And this," Donn set her down finally to sweep his hand at him, as though taking it all in, "this must be the infamous Lightning Count, Zechs Merquise!"

He grunted some form of non-committal pleasantry while the vast majority of his mind power rerouted towards placing the man whose neck his _partner_ was hanging off of. Didn't she say at some point that she had brothers? Six of them, one of whom was his Court-appointed chess tutor. With any luck, one of the others had been named Donn…

"How have you been, Lucrezia? I heard about Lake Victoria, and then there was that thing about an ESUN warrant?" He turned his puppy-dog brown eyes back on Zechs, who was still dumbly holding his hand. "What kind of trouble have you been getting my girl into, eh?"

"Donn, stop," Noin shook her head at him, eyes sparkling, tiptoeing, "I can't blame Zechs— he's not my keeper!"

In that moment, irrational as the thought was, he rather wished she did.

"Honest to God?" There was an infectious quality in the man's open expressions that he was determined not to be swayed by. Anyone that charismatic must be harbouring some nefarious agenda.

The dispossessed prince chuckled charmingly and retrieved his hand with a sophisticated calm. "Lieutenant Noin is quite capable of getting into trouble on her own."

"And don't I know it!" Donn laughed, already focusing his attentions back on Noin.

"Lucy," he said, making Zechs' skin crawl, "I've been worried sick about you, doll, and there's one thing I really need to do."

"What is it?" She giggled, _giggled_, like a giddy schoolgirl.

And, as he suffered a thousand horridly petty deaths in the pilot's vivid imagination, the bear-like athlete picked Noin up and kissed her full and deep on the lips, right in front of everyone in the hanger.

**...**


	12. 1000hz: What I Wouldn't Do

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#017 kHz  
A.C. 197, May 3, 20:17pm 「What I Wouldn't Do」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

The average human heart runs at 1.2 hertz, which is 1.2 cycles a second, or 72 beats a minute. Noin's might very well be near 2, she was so excited.

He didn't want to ruin it by sounding defensive, which made him feel awkward, since that was pretty much how he felt. So, he sat on her bed and drank while she pulled a hairbrush through her hair and slipped into a modestly cropped summer dress under a bistre leather flight jacket that was half a size too large in the shoulders for her. The overall effect, with her pale fingers peeking from the sleeves, was distressingly cute. It was the same jacket he would have gone to Mars the first time in, half a size too small for him as it were. There had been some very stern words concerning the return of that jacket.

"Wasn't the mechanic's name Michelangelo?"

"That was Summer 191. Remember? He had that ringlet hair…"

"How I wish I didn't. Argh, Noin, the janitor's closet? It's like you wanted to get caught." The janitorial closet closest to any given party site was the Specials' customary liquor-stash for any illicit social gatherings at which attendance is expected to break single digits. Since the Specials took turns at their own cleaning duties, this always ensured that whoever was planning the parties would put themselves on janitorial duty days before, during and after. One of the favourite past-times of grounded OZ troops was sniffing out said stashes since, by traditional, anyone who finds the beer has to be invited, or allowed to rat you out.

"It was my party, Zechs," she smirked. "And you're right, it was a pretty good thrill." _You could have joined in, Michelangelo wouldn't have minded, _he imagined her saying, and groaned. He wasn't even drunk yet. What's wrong with him?

"Hah," she stuck her tongue out at him, misunderstanding. "You've done worse, I'm sure of it."

She was nervous, he could tell. She'd almost left in her scruffy old sneakers.

"I'm not telling you anything," he laughed, the pair of yellow slippers he had been lounging with dangling from his long, elegant, fingertips. She pulled them on quickly, braced against his lean chest for support. She had painted her nails the deep, slightly shimmery, midnight-plum colour at the edges of space.

"Have fun, Noin, don't do anything I wouldn't do."

The average door engagement sequence takes 2.5 seconds at 5 hertz, which makes 12.5 gear-rotations, to open or close a single-width doorway.

"You're dying to ask if I have a brother named Donn." She grinned, handing him her keycard. "Fall term, 193. The answer is no. Don't wait up."

The number of pictures a good camera delivers to form a live feed is 240 per second, twice the number of images actually displayed on a standard screen. The best security monitors are only rated at 180 hertz. There's still a lot that could go on, unseen.

Zechs hadn't planned on waiting. He had enough big brother issues with Relena and did not need to develop any more with Noin.

The plan was to head into Central Security and acquaint himself with the standard and available equipment. His forte had been Mobile Suits and tactical combat, not poking around security protocols and spy gadgets. Luckily, he was a quick study. Unfortunately, his mind kept drifting back to the bistre leather jacket.

Noin can pretend what she likes, that jacket belonged to him. He had left it behind the last time he saw her before Operation Meteor began, and the fact that she still had it was causing him several degrees of angst. First of all, it was _his_ jacket.

Secondly, it had been brand new when he'd left it. He remembered the way it sat perfectly on him, and how it came almost past her hips and swallowed her arms whole in the chilly night. Her last growth spurt had surprised him.

Thirdly, there had been something quite mortifying in his pockets he had not meant for her to see. If she has had the jacket all this time and worn it, and since the pockets were empty when he'd checked three months ago, then she must have seen and kept it, or gotten rid of it. He couldn't tell which would have been worse.

His Second Thoughts questioned the slip. If he had left the jacket for her, then he must have secretly hoped that she would search its pockets and discover the token. If he was sure about what he'd meant when he'd put it in his pocket and went up to Lake Victoria to see her that afternoon, he had lost his nerve by the end of the night and had not been able to find it since.

On the other hand, it was almost three years and six weeks ago— there was really very little point in dwelling on it, especially when she was happily kissing another man in one of the eighteen real-time dramas playing out in front of him.

He had to wonder what it would be like to kiss a woman who actually knew his name. It wasn't that he hadn't tried, but apparently, claiming to be the renegade heir of an ancient, legendary, kingdom was a legitimate pick-up at most bars. He could get them to do whatever he wanted, believe any outrageous lie, except the truth.

It wasn't that he was madly and secretly pining after her either, although he had to admit to being somewhat miffed that she didn't make a habit of collecting just anyone's teeth for trying to kiss her.

He was maybe a little bit jealous that it seemed so much easier for her to discover people on the same wavelength. Not entirely, of course, that sort of perfect synchronism is only possible in fairy-tales, but just enough to make two people look good together, like her and Donn.

120 hertz is more than enough to see that.

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
Bear with me, this is only the 12th of 30 kisses and part 2 of ?, and I'm not done counting up to 1000 hertz yet...


	13. Unspoken: The Secret Lives of Gardenias

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#011 くちなしの花  
A.C. 180 February ~ A.C. 197, May 3, 21:14pm 「The Secret Lives of Gardenias」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB

This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

**.I.**

He sent her a single gardenia on her first official day with the Preventers, a message of good luck, left on her doorstep with sap still oozing from its cut stem. She'd stood it in a small shot-glass and kept it on her night-stand for days, amused and exasperated, wondering who at the dorms he could have bribed to deliver it and why he couldn't have put it in words and sent her a video-mail or something. Plants weren't very forthcoming with the news on how someone was doing.

He was always hiding behind literature and symbols, as if he didn't know how else to relate to anyone. From what she'd heard, back in the day, it worked pretty well on the _other_ girls around the Specials' base camps. Pretty girls with long, flowing hair and fragile skin, who found it more natural to curtsey than to bow, and delighted in nosegays and poetry from mysterious, dashing, young pilots.

The only reason she even understood a fraction of what he'd meant in that little flowery gesture was growing up with two older sisters, one of whom was a notable romantic scholar, and the other, a veritable man-eater. She was neither.

**.**

**.II.**

They weren't going to have another reunion, not after what had happened last year with Anne breaking down in the midst of reading out The List of their dead and missing. "How can you stand listening to this, year after year? All we do here is watch each other die like some kind of spectator sport, and every year, more of us turn up maimed or crippled!"

She didn't see the humour in Werden's assertion that shooting himself in the foot was the surest way of getting his leave approved.

Zechs had not been there, though he didn't need to, not to guess how Noin would feel about it. She was already in their old homeroom when he arrived, sitting alone in the late afternoon sun with a can she had not bothered to detach from the six-pack.

"Drinking alone is for sentimental old men," he smirked, leaning casually into the doorway.

She pulled another six-pack from nowhere, set it down next to her, and smiled. "You'd better get a move-on then, because I'm already eight ahead."

He saw, as he moved closer, that she'd scribbled 'Zechs' in indelible black marker across each of the cans standing on the desk and 'Noin' across each of those she was working on. The cases she was perched on were similarly marked.

"How did you know I'd be here?"_ Snap-hiss_. The beer was cold.

"I figured if you didn't, I could probably drink your half," she shrugged.

He chuckled. "Ah, spoken like a true alcoholic."

"I don't think I'm drunk enough to take lectures from a tin-can yet," she tapped the side of his new mask. Colonel Khushrenada had commissioned it as a personal gift to his prodigy, in commemoration of his eighteenth birthday several weeks ago. Zechs wore it as a token of their mutual pact. Noin was convinced Treize'd intended it as a joke. It would be the kind of thing that the twisted nobleman might find funny.

They drank in a comfortable silence, she finding solace in the warm, solid, shadow he cast in the dying light, and he in the ineffable air of calm she carried around with her.

Werner joined them at the eight o'clock study bell with a cast around his off-hand. "Dropped an Aries modulated joint on it," he grinned in explanation to Noin's raised eyebrow, and whistled an appreciative note at Zechs' new look.

Kiskner, Langley and Min walked in on the boys arguing with James and Utsuki, Sergeant-Major Utsuki now, about the superior symbolism of full-helms.

"Is this a private party?" Langley asked of Noin, who was wisely staying out of it.

"No," she embraced the stout Liaison Agent with a laugh, "but you've got to bring your own beer."

And that was how it was.

True, there were only thirteen of them that March evening, out of the ninety-two who had graduated with the Flight Class of A.C. 189 and the fifty-seven who were still listed on active duty, but, they had agreed, so long as there was one man or woman to raise a toast for them, one person out of their ninety-two left standing at the end of the day, willing to remember their names and even one stupid, unremarkable, thing they had done, it would be more than they could ever ask for. So that night, they read The List and drank and yelled and cheered, and celebrated the lives of their absent and departed.

Half the party had reported back to their posts before the rest were up, and whoever had stayed to help with the clean-up were too hung-over to remember which day it was, much less what'd belonged to whom. When every trace of the previous night's mayhem had been erased and she had seen the last of her classmates off, Noin returned to her quarters in the instructors' wing to make a start on the lost-and-found mailings. Thank god for if-lost-return-to tags.

Langley will need his keys back, as will James, when she realises she didn't take them with her when she'd exchanged pants with Min. Werner had run after Kiskner with his security pass, and they hadn't been sure whose patch the extra stripes they'd found had fallen off of, or whose stockings it was tucked under the lecturer's stand. All in all, Noin was surprised they'd managed to leave campus with the right heads on.

She could find nothing to identify the owner of the leather flight jacket she had accidentally dozed off on, except a blank piece of much-handled paper and a slightly slept-on gardenia bloom that flooded her sterile room with its scent, and whose bruised petals she'd gently kissed, wondering what it could mean.

**.**

**.III.**

The first time she was ever given flowers was the day she'd graduated from the Lake Victoria Specials' Training Academy.

Whoever it was had pinned the simple white corsage on her pillow with a plain card inscribed in an elegant hand:

"_To the heart's Console,  
In modest return for a gift received._

_~M._"

Console was the old translation for _Svala_, the swallow, and unique symbol of her family; and M. would only be one man, technically still a boy. She wasn't sure what the 'gift received' could be, but it was too late to ask him. As top student of the Flight Class of 189, he had been flown out to a special luncheon on the General's private jet right after receiving his first stripes. The rest of them had to be shipped off together, like peas in a pod.

She burnt the card with a match and stuck the flower on her book-strap, putting it out of mind until a neighbour on the transport raised comment. Flora was not a thing normally associated with her.

"It's a going away present from a friend," she'd smiled. "Gardenias mean 'good luck'."

"No they don't,"

"Yes, they do. I heard it from my sisters." Which is as good a citation as any on these matters when you're twelve, almost thirteen.

"Well, okay," the nerdy little boy leaning over the seat across from her conceded, "but they also mean 'secret love'. That's why my brother sends them to all his crushes."

Now, a sister was better authority on the language of flowers any day, but it wasn't every day that they got such a big drop on this particular little girl. So, even though they didn't really believe it, they did tease her all week with whispered refrains of _"Noin has a bo~yfriend~"_

**.**

**.IV.**

It was the first time in ten months she had gone on a real date, and not one of those sympathy dates Sally had invented for them poor ladies who can't seem to hold on to a man. The lifestyle was definitely a handicap.

She realised with soul-crushing embarrassment that she'd forgotten to call Brandon about standing him up on Christmas, and had continued, to this minute, to forget to call him. She wouldn't be surprised if he'd, like every other reasonable boyfriend whose dates had forgotten to call after coming home from a death-defying stunt, thought her dead.

They had started a list at the office, where you could put down the name and contact number of whoever you're currently seeing and someone will give them a ring when you forget to, and tell them whatever secret-agent-man break-up story you wanted them to believe. Again, Sally's idea.

Noin had never gotten around to signing anyone up. She never knew what to have them hear. '_Sorry, I almost died again yesterday and I realised as my life was flashing before my eyes that you weren't in it_'?

Donn had worked one Fall semester in Lake Victoria, four years ago. He was a Romefeller Enterprises engineer sent to liaise with the Mechs Instructors on the latest developments in Mobile Suit maintenance and diagnostics. She had been invited to sit in as the Flight Instructor with the best grasp of the technologies behind keeping them in the air, and shown him a thing or two in the hangers. A few days later, he had shown her a thing or two in the Instructors' mess hall, and in the six weeks he was there, a thing or two in his guest hall bed. She'd always had a weakness for men who could cook.

They had a good time. People in her position couldn't expect any more than that. As a Specials' Officer, her life had belonged to OZ. She ate when they said and went where they point, that was the way it worked. As a Preventer, things had been more chaotic, often with '_by any means necessary_' as her only instructions. And well, as the last remaining member of Sanq's defunct Order of the Thorn, her priorities will always be the Peacecrafts, Vice Foreign Minister Relena Darlian and her brother, Public Enemy Number One, Zechs Merquise.

She wasn't going to feel guilty about needing to find herself outside of all that, damn it. She was twenty years old, three months and eleven days away from starting her second decade in God's onyx universe and had known nothing in her life but war, mecha and conspiracy. She had been thinking a lot about something someone had said to her a long time ago, _you need to fit something in there for yourself, too._ In her attempts to figure out who it had been, she saw instead how pathetically empty her personal phonebook was.

So, she had thrown herself into the spirit of the moment and let Donn try to rekindle a torch she had not meant to carry. She had forgotten what a real kiss should feel like, with passion and tongue. She'd felt important around him for being nothing more than herself, those six weeks, even though 'herself' had been a lie. She'd enjoyed the freedom of not having to worry about impressing him or defending her position against him, or having to explain herself to him at some later, indeterminate date. She didn't even, for the life of her, remember his last name.

_Oh, my god,_ she panicked in sudden realisation. _I hope he doesn't ask me to marry him!_

He broke away first, holding her fast against him with a mischievous brightness in his chocolaty eyes. "I hope you're not expecting me to propose, Lucy."

Her face must have been a picture, because he laughed and tapped her chin affectionately as he set her back down.

"It's been a while since you've been back in the game, huh," he grinned.

"Yea," she blushed with a nervous little laugh of her own, almost mistaking 'the game' for 'mercenary work'.

"Want to take a raincheck on the rest of this date?" She had forgotten how wonderfully kind he was.

"No," Noin said shyly, "no, I'm okay."

And that was when she plunged her hands into the sides of her jacket and found the papery, prickly, thing tucked away in a pocket.

She pulled out a desiccated plant. Most of its colours had faded to earthy browns and yellows, except a cuticle-width of white on the rose-like petals, around the floral axis. There was still hint of perfume in the _gardenia jasminoides_.

"What's that?" Donn reached out to get a better look.

"It's nothing, just a flower," she shrugged casually, stuffing it back in its pocket. "I must've picked it up from somewhere ages ago."

The last time she'd worn this jacket was in January, before Zechs'd tried to run away with it to Mars after his birthday. She hadn't gotten it back until they started packing for the Megmillion Mars Expedition the day before, and then she had to snatch it off his bed and basically wrestle him for it like brothers over a favourite toy.

Donn chuckled warmly, patting down each of his seven pockets for his keycard. "I hadn't pegged you for the flower-picking type."

"I'm not," she protested lightly. Looking down at her scuffling toes, all she could think about in that instant was the long, delicate fingers holding out her shoes, and the faintly lingering scent of gardenias. "Usually."

"That's alright," he smiled, swiping his card against the door, "nobody's one way or the other all the time."

_It takes 2.5 seconds for a standard-width door to slide open…_

"Uh, Donn?" Noin looked up. "I think I'll just be going... to go back to mine tonight…"

He looked at her, patiently understanding as always, like a puppy waiting to be kicked. "I understand, it's been a long day for everyone and you're tired. Knowing you, you haven't been to bed in at least forty hours."

_Thirty-two hours and twenty-three minutes._ "Busted," she grimaced.

He shuffled forward to envelope her in a great hug. "Don't you apologise for that, Lucy. You're always working too hard at trying to please. Try to remember sometimes that you're lovely, just as you are."

"Thanks Donn," she smiled. "I'll see you tomorrow, or something."

**.**

**.V.**

His first memory of gardenias took him back to his fourth birthday party, where an unusually early spring had prompted his mother to propose a garden party instead of his usual Treasure Hunt Adventure through the royal palace of Sanq.

It was the first time he'd met the gorgeous, tawny, girl of the cold, piercing, eyes he had been told he will marry some day. He'd made up his mind then, that she would be the most beautiful bride in the world. It had taken all his spider-hunting courage to invite her to dance.

"_Maybe when you're as tall as I am, I will consider,"_ she'd said, staring decisively down at him from her delicately chiselled nose. A major set-back, since she was six years his senior and ten seemed an eternity away, though it had not been enough to dampen his spirits.

There was ice-cream and cake, and presents, and everything was done up in his favourite colour, white. He had been allowed to write some of the invitations on his own, something he was still quite smug about, and eat alone with his friends at the Prince's Table. "All this," his parents had granted indulgently, "is because you are going to be a big brother soon. You have to learn to be a big boy, now." He bowed deeply for the Queen and shook the King by the hand solemnly, to seal his end of the bargain.

"Your Highness," a lanky young man started apologetically for interrupting his survey of the festivities. The princeling refrained from throwing himself around the older boy's legs and clasped his forearm in a gesture he had seen his father greet his closest companions with, instead.

"Luciano, I was afraid I'd missed you!" It was more difficult to keep the glee off his little face.

"Not using the royal 'we', Highness?"

"No," Milliardo replied thoughtfully, "I think, since we're such close friends, we can dispense with the ceremonies.

"Besides," he leaned in in a confidential whisper, "it's so confusing! What if I'd meant 'just me' and not 'both of us'? What should I do then?"

"I think that is a question for your Master of Etiquettes," Luciano laughed. "I'm afraid I can only be of service in interpreting the finer mysteries of chess." His eyes crinkle and almost disappear into his cheeks. It was an odd expression that the younger boy did as much as he could to provoke.

"I was wondering, your Highness, if you aren't too busy watching over us," the Prince's Chessmaster stepped gracefully aside with a low sweeping bow, "You'd requested I present to you my youngest sister, Alessandra Lucrezia Cosmino di Luculo."

If her brother had not brought his attention to the raven-crowned child, Milliardo would easily have missed her. She was not remarkable, save for the clear light of intelligence that lurked behind her eyes. The ice-blue frock she modelled was immaculate, although shocking in its lack of laces and bows. She did not seem to have the same aversion to ribbons, two pairs of which, icy blue and lilac, were tied into her matching ponytails. He knew her by reputation.

Luciano's sister, the one who'd built a mobile tower fortress from a rolling ladder and an unspecified number of books in the Marchese di Luculo's private study this past summer; who'd menaced the kitchen cats and chickens with a stick until her brothers' fencing instructor, feeling sorry for the animals, had allowed her to watch him teach last week. The girl whose best parlour trick was reciting the names of constellations in order of discovery: she was up to stars of the autumn sky, now. Little, darling, Alesso, who was in competition with him for Luciano's affections, and whose fondest wish in her four year-old heart was to have her very own steed, a spirited Arabian bay she could take into battle, not one of those sissy grey ponies they'd given her elder sisters. Her words.

The prince held out his right hand to be kissed, as was proper. The girl dropped an appropriate curtsey, stumbling her lips lightly over his glove, and mumbled something under the cover of her shoulder-length locks. Before he could ask her to repeat herself, she had run away into the forest of dresses near the Queen's Pergola.

Luciano watched her go, puzzled. "You have to forgive her, your Highness, she is not usually this shy with strangers."

Milliardo grinned, score one for the Royal Prince.

Other distractions from that day that will come back to haunt him in adulthood, like the old man who grimaced at all the children while speaking hostilely to his father about war and fighting from the corner of his thin, chapped, lips, and the radiant woman with a golden waterfall of curls, who sat holding his pregnant mother's hand, wearing an expression of pure love and worship.

But the character he will remember the most was a tall, stately woman who wore her midnight tresses in a simple French twist secured by a comb set with a row of diamond Christmas roses that shone like stars in her hair. He had heard several people address her as 'Marchessa', and Luciano once as 'Mamma'. When she glided up to the Prince's Table to request his audience, she spoke with a slight Austrian accent.

"Your Royal Highness," she had said, smiling under the watchful eye of a certain little girl. "I have come before you bearing a gift on behalf of my daughter. May it bring you joy in the days to come."

He received a perfect white blossom from this magnificent Pallas Athena and brushed its petals to his lips as a sign of acceptance, staring regally into her deep, purple, eyes.

"Madam," he bowed just deep enough to be correct, kicking himself for forgetting the right way to address a Marchessa. "It is my pleasure."

"Sorry I couldn't get you anything better," someone hiding amongst her skirts piped up derisively. "I didn't know it was your birthday."

"I'm afraid she stole it from her Majesty's bower," the Marchessa di Luculo chuckled, pushing the little girl fully in front of her with firmly adoring hands on both her tiny shoulders. "I hope you don't mind."

**...**

.

**A/N:  
Gardenias**: before we move off the topic of gardenias, these are the five main _hanakotoba_ (_flower language_) of Gardenias: Good luck, Secret love, Sweet love, 'You're lovely', and Joy. I've used each one as the inspiration for each of the five tales.

The Japanese name of gardenia is _kushinashi no hana_, which literally means '_the blossom of something unspoken_'.

Also, I've created a horde of O/Cs to populate the empty spaces in their lives. Don't shoot me.


	14. EnDash: Until— ?

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#009 ダッシュ & #017 kHz (reprisal)  
A.C. 197, May 3, 22:12pm 「Until— ?」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

_An average medium-security door is programmed to wait for 6 seconds before initiating its 'close' cycle, unless otherwise instructed. Low security doors tended to stay open until they are closed, and high security doors maintained strict routines between .25 and .8 of a second._

These were the kind of thoughts Noin recited under her breath to keep her pulse steady as she waited in the halls for Zechs. She'd tried star vectors after the names of constellations, and given up on both when they didn't put her in the right frame of mind. Not that she was sure what the "right" frame of mind to use when confronting the most important person in her life was. Every time she'd received anything from him he had closed himself off and gone away, a situation she had grown quite frustrated with.

The acceptable response standard for a security team aboard the _Marsprojekt_ is 18 minutes, which was pretty demanding for a vessel of its size. He had challenged her, earlier that afternoon, to cross the longest distance within the ship in that time, an unfamiliar route that took them from the main observation deck to a janitorial locker at the bottom of the engine room. It had taken 16 minutes, with him less than a minute ahead of her, and only 9 when they'd ran the course back upstairs as a team. There was no denying that they were better together, and she didn't want to lose that.

But she couldn't go on living in a constant spin-about with him, either.

He was her reason, for far too many years to ignore. Religiously monitoring his flaws and progress, watching his back in plain sight and behind his back, they've become a habit she couldn't shake. He was her rival, sometimes her friend, and the only connection she had to her true history. Zechs was family, that much could never be changed.

She'd believed she'd loved him at fifteen, for all of four months until she'd realised the problem was in her hormones. Dating Michelangelo fixed that. She had thought he loved her at eighteen, and then sensibly put it out of mind when news of his victories with the ladies trickled in amongst her students again. She doesn't even know what to think of the thing he'd left her last year, while he was supposed to be dead. She wasn't his type. Milliardo Peacecraft's girls did not drink like fish or spend their spare moments tinkering around heavy machinery. They were delicate and pretty, better than he was in the kitchen, and appreciated his affair with cryptic messages and flowers, and symbols. Noin, for all her fairly respectable knowledge and understanding in these literary matters, preferred presentations that were much more straightforward.

She was proud of the fierce love she held for the Prince, the one her mother had called 'loyalty'. She was not so certain about the truth of her feelings. How does one know if they are properly in love anyway? She had not been given the proper protocol on falling in love with her liege-lord, although she was reasonably confident that it would be frowned upon. She wished often for the advice of her family, even her socialite sister. Mamma would know what was right to do. Marchese Attilio, as he had always insisted to be known to his children, would take her by the hand— she was too old to sit on his knee at twenty as she had at age nine— and ask her her heart. Letizia, wherever she might be, could probably tell her all the things that being in love was not, after she was done teasing her littlest she-brother.

And Luciano and Isadora, what would they say?

_The maximum delay on a klaxon alarm is 2.4 seconds from activation and 1.2 seconds for a silent alarm. The initialisation period on an average security camera is 12 seconds from power-on. Even the best monitors available only transmit 180 of the 240 images taken at any particular second._

Of all the things Zechs had not been expecting, Noin hanging around his quarters two hours into her date was listed somewhere in the thirties, after being assigned a private bathroom, among other little things too much to hope for. Admittedly, there was also the point that she had left her keycard with him, so he had to wonder what had gone wrong with Donn.

This quickly changed to item number twelve on his list of situations he'd hoped would not come up until he was on his deathbed, which had included having to marry Relena off to Treize, when he saw her scowl and the dead thing in her hand that was once a pure white blossom. He kicked himself so hard that he actually winced.

He'd forgotten about the flower he'd picked in the bushes near her Preventer dorm back in February. It was to be the only personal thing from Earth that he was going to bring to the new life Lady Une had so kindly aborted, besides his books; something to remember her by.

The look on her face said everything.

"I don't suppose you'd believe I just like gardenias," he sighed.

"Not after the third one."

"Noin…"

His relationship to her was… complicated. He is the prodigal heir of a dead Kingdom to whom she had pledged absolute allegiance, and he was doomed to forever fail the vassal that she was. She had made his desires her cause whenever he'd let her, and his troubles her pain when he wouldn't. Sword and Shield, as best she could, the way she was taught. She is the best wingman he has ever known and secretly his equal, besides. He saw her as the light that was his shadow, his anchor and his escape. She was, for many years, his best and only friend. She was the person at whose hands he dreams his death. Somehow, they had managed to hold it all together through the years, and it was all of it too precious to risk.

"How long do we have to keep dancing around this until you explain yourself?" She demanded calmly.

Zechs' ears buzzed at 1000 hertz, under the pressure of 833.33 alternate realities being created in that single, thundering, heartbeat. In some of them, he kisses her. In others, she kissed him. Clumsy, green kisses; uncertain, longing kisses; passionate kisses of unspoken love; world-shaking kisses that have felled nations and civilisations. Sometimes they go to sleep next to each other and wake up finding nothing, or everything, had changed. In most of them, they say nothing and he lets her go, or she lets him go. The difference is ultimately negligible.

He uses all of his millisecond window to reach out and brush her cheek.

"Noin, you've been on my side since I can remember, and I don't dare to ruin that. More than the heartache, I'm sure you're the only person in the universe actually capable of destroying me, based purely on skills and tactical combat abilities. I mean, you kept up with the Gundams in a Taurus! Imagine what you could have done if we'd put you in a custom G-class of your own…"

"Peacecraft," she interrupted gently, "you're rambling."

He paused, feeling lost in the distance between them.

"_Mon coeur_, you are the kite string of my existence and I can think of no one better… but I am not your prince yet. Right now, I am just some guy who fell from the stars."

"I won't wait for you," she whispered, close to tears.

"I know." Zechs brought her fingers to his face, and turning his head ever so slightly, planted a firm, dry kiss in the palm of her left hand. "Live the way you want. Love the way you want. And I will fight anything that might stand between me and your hand when I'm ready, even you." He smiled wryly into her deep purple stare. "So for now, it's okay, Lucrezia. You have to fit some things in your life for yourself."

"I've been trying to remember who'd first said that to me," she closed her eyes against the intense Nile blue of his, changing the subject.

He obliged and let go of her hands. "It was I, the winter of 191."

"Really?" She was surprised to realise he was right. She could think of no one else who would have asked, _ordered_, her to be selfish. "That's right," she chuckled at his nod. "It was your argument for me to take the junior Instructor offer instead of join up with your flight squadron."

"You wouldn't have been happy as a pilot."

"I," she prodded him accusatorily in the chest, "would have beat you for squad leader."

"Yes," Zechs laughed, "that too."

**...**

.

**Glossary:**  
_Mon coeur_ – French. "My heart"

**A/N:**  
The Marsprojekt is named in honour of Wernher von Braun, the first man to detail a Mars expedition way back in 1946. The Megmillion Mars Expedition's mothership is named after his ship. It isn't anyone's fault but his own that he'd only as much romance in his soul to name the vessel _Marsprojekt_.

I've always wanted to use "world-shaking" in something other than SailorUranus' attack.


	15. Verbal Strut: We Are A Team

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#018 「アーン？」  
A.C. 197, May 4, 07:03am 「We Are A Team」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

He found him sitting alone in Mess Hall 2, reading a technical manual over what appeared to be dehydrated wood shavings.

He made a face and straddled the opposite bench. "Cornflakes?"

"Fruit salad, actually."

If he had blinked, he would have missed the gleam in his blue eyes as the pilot looked up. Donn grinned.

"Nobody said you've got a sense of humour."

"I'm not surprised," Zechs shrugged, carefully marking his place with a scrap of sapphire ribbon. "People don't get to know me much, lately."

The bulky mechanic put out his hand. "Sheldon Donnovan, Space Guild First-Class."

Zechs looked down at the enormous paw at the end of the small trees Donn had for arms. He could probably take him with a little speed and cunning. He shook hands politely. "Space Guild First-Class, very impressive."

"Yea, well, only the best for the best, eh?" Donn chuckled self-consciously and swung his other leg over the bench to face the other man properly. "So what do you go by these days? Zechs Merquise, or…"

"Zechs is fine."

"Okay, Zechs." The large man beamed nervously, which made him feel bad about being curt. "I wanted to say, well, that I think I understand why you did what you did. There's a bunch of us who do…"

Donn startled at the sudden, sharp _look_ and started back paddling as fast as he could. "That is, we don't mean to presume… we just… uh…"

"The war is over, Man," Zechs said mildly, betraying none of the twisting pangs of pleasure and insult from hearing the news. Some part of him was outraged that people could just look at his exposed history and presume to understand him. Others felt vindicated. There was guilt too, and regret. Treize was the true mastermind, the one who should be standing here in his shoes today, being told that his kind intentions have reached another heart, not him. Of course, Treize would merely laugh and inform those masses that they are mistaken, and all he'd ever aspired to be was a tyrant worthy of his own page in history. "Let it go."

Zechs looked at the man and thought about the kiss he had witnessed on the cameras last night and the things he had said to Noin afterwards. Sheldon Donnovan did not deserve his hostility simply for showing an interest in his partner and friend. "Listen, about Lucy, ah…"

No, he received at least half of it on account of his tasteless shortening of her name.

"…people've been saying stuff, about nobles and soldiers, and uh… you guys seem to be pretty tight… you two aren't, you know… …"

"Physically intimate?" It was fun to watch him dance around the words for all of five seconds. More than that, and Zechs got bored. "Why don't you ask her?"

Donn turned an interesting shade of green. "It wouldn't be… it won't be… it ain't done to ask a lady something like that."

The Lightning Count stirred his dry cereal lazily. "Anyone who has served with the Specials can tell you there are many things that people say happened which we could only wish were true. Filet Mignon dinners were one such favourite." He paused, and chewed on his breakfast. "We were a very tight-knit group. Fraternisation amongst the ranks was strictly forbidden. The General likened it to incest. So no, Donnovan, we aren't."

"Oh good," his sigh of relief rattled through the bench and table. "It's just… I was afraid… with things between me and her and all that, I didn't want you to feel left out... we have to work together and stuff, after all."

Zechs regarded the man behind a thoughtful mask, faintly nauseous that anyone could presume the only meaningful relationships between people to be those that are physically consummated, and quietly annoyed that he thought dating Noin could take her away from him. They were stronger, deeper, than any acts of passion or gifts and roses. "Thank you," he smiled instead. "I was going to say the same. Noin and I have had a long history together, and some habits are hard to break, but you should know I do appreciate that the three of us will be working together as a team."

"Well, now, don't I look the fool?" Sheldon Donnovan, Space Guild mechanic First-Class, guffawed.

It wasn't that he was a bad man, the commanding blonde decided, and it wasn't that he was biased against him in any way, exactly. He was sure Donn was a nice man who worked hard and honestly at everything he does and genuinely cared about positive feelings around the workplace, the kind of man who would volunteer to do the laundry and let his wife hold the remote control. He just didn't like him very much as a person. There weren't many that Zechs did.

"So, Zechs, anyone special in your life?"

Zechs Merquise smirked. "As a matter of fact, I'm engaged."

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
I realised I should clear things up, this series is not related to "Last Impressions" or "Martian Dust". Both those were meant to be stand-alone one-shots from different possibilities of their relationship that I'd struck upon while I tried to work out the details for this Fan-verse. So, AU to this series, but not AU to Gundam Wing. Hope that makes sense.

So, yea, Zechs apparently suddenly thinks he is engaged. Did I mention about him being one of those strange Aquarius boys?


	16. Perfect Blue: I Know Who You Want…

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#015 Perfect Blue  
A.C. 197, May 12 「I Know Who You Want, And It's Not Me」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

The last thing Noin'd expected to find on Mars was Quatre Raberba Winner sipping from a clear glass in a bar at the Mars orbital Hub.

"Hello, stranger," she smiled, accepting the silent invitation to join him. "Aren't you a little young for alcohol?"

"Can I buy you a drink?" He asked instead, presenting a charming kiss to the back of her hand with a mischievous look.

To a casual observer, the stripling head of the Winner Corporation was innocently chatting up another older woman to fill his britches, just as he has done every night since arriving to deliver the space station, and will every night until his departure. His actual success rate is the source of much speculation, although no-one was naive enough to think that he would go home with any of them on his arm as the next Mrs Winner. Had anyone noticed that his lady of the evening was Zechs Merquise's flight partner, they said nothing. If not for her unusual purple eyes, Noin was not terribly distinguishable from other short-haired brunettes.

To the Preventer last known as Fire, Quatre would never make a good field agent. His Achilles' heel was the pleasure that inevitably showed whenever he achieved a goal, like Maxwell's boyish excitement, though much better disguised and contained. They shared a few drinks before vacating their seats in search of fresh air and privacy, both of which were found in an area unofficially designated Lovers' Terrace, a series of alcoves tucked between shelves of aeroponic seedlings, originally designed for maintenance access.

The first personal thing she said to him was "how's things with Trowa?" And noted with pride that he did not blush one bit when informing her that they were both doing well. She already knew, when he drew a flat brown package out from the inner recesses of his suit jacket, that it must have come from Relena. The Preventer agency would have had whatever it was slipped amongst her things in the most invisible way possible. Relena would want someone to see the face of the addressee when they see what she has sent.

Noin opened the envelope unceremoniously, her face tightly drawn, expecting more bad news from the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. It must be pretty dire to make the Vice Foreign Minister risk contacting them. As far as ESUN leaders were aware, the world had lost track of ex-OZ officers Noin and Merquise and presumed them dead after the Libra incident, until they were spotted arguing at a florist within the 20-mile radius of Vice Foreign Minister Darlian's townhouse, fifty miles from the new Parliament House, and five minutes to the apartment where the Secretary of Internal Security kept his mistress. Lady Une had given them both an exasperated sigh and a week of menial deskwork, several times worse than anything else she could have done to them, for the oversight. No-one has officially seen nor heard from them since.

"We, that is, Relena, Sally and me, thought you should have this," Quatre said softly as a piece of scorched parchment encased in clear protective laminate slid into Noin's hand. She stared, slack-jawed for the first time since Quatre has known her.

"Is something wrong, Miss Noin?" She had gone deathly pale.

"Have you…" the woman whispered hoarsely, "have you shown this to anyone else… Une…"

"No. Wufei was with Relena and Sally when they found it, and we've all agreed that this is not a Preventer matter. Even though Wufei wouldn't say it, I'm sure he will be happy for you…" his enthusiasm wavered on the last three words, sensing a strange squeeze on his heart.

"We thought it was destroyed in the fire…" Noin trembled, inspecting the tragic fragment with its faded inks and missing seals, tracing the impression left by the third crest with a delicate finger. Quatre did not dare break her reverie to ask who 'we' were.

"Why… why bring it to me?"

He would have thought it'd be obvious, unless they had been wrong and things were more strained than they had guessed between Zechs and Noin. "Because it's yours. We thought it would help you and Milliardo get to the next stage," he managed to say with coherency.

Noin frowned.

"Quartre, this is proof of his marriage to Lady Anatolie. What's that got to do with me?"

Quatre smiled with failing conviction. "It's okay, Miss Noin, the war is over, neither of you have any reason to conceal your real identities any more. We know you are the Anatolie Dau he married sixteen years ago…"

"You're making a terrible mistake." She interrupted, resealing the evidence.

"Why, Miss Noin?" He pressed a hand on her arm, demanding. "Didn't you once tell Relena that you love him?"

"Please, Quatre, you don't understand," she said quietly, angering him.

"Because the war is over so you no longer feel you have a place beside him? Because Sanq is gone and he thinks he is a dead man? None of that changes the fact that you are both alive and need each other!" He cried, "all of us can tell, why can't you? Don't you see? Your love is what gives the rest of us hope, if someone like him can find forgiveness and love, so can we all! What is the point of everything we've done if in the end it just causes sadness for those we care about? There are a lot of people who care about you, Miss Noin, so even if he's the worst fellow there ever was, although none of us really know or like him, he makes you happy and we just want you to be happy…"

"Quatre," Noin grabbed his chin in one firm hand, forcing him to look at her through his tears. "Quatre, thank you." There was a gentleness in the kiss she pressed to his forehead that warmed him. He drew a fist across his eyes and sniffed pathetically.

"Have you calmed down?" He nodded. "Good, I need you to listen very carefully to me," she returned Relena's package to his pocket. "You need to take that back to Lady Une, because she was Treize's Colonel Une. She should be the one to decide what to do with that, and she will probably know best."

"Why, Miss Noin?" He pleaded once again, giving in to what he thought was right. "I'm only a kid, but if it's a matter between two people, shouldn't they be the ones to deal with it and not someone else?"

"Yes, that is exactly why I can't be involved."

The awful realisation sunk in. "You're not Anatolie Dau…"

She shook her head.

"But you know who she is."

"Yes."

Quatre's guts twisted. The thought of Zechs and Lady Une being friendly with each other was… well, he couldn't decide if he should be frightened or sick.

Noin chuckled lightly at the stricken look he wore. "Don't worry, she would be twenty-eight this year if she is still alive. Une is too young."

It hadn't occurred to anyone in the honour of the German dictatress' acquaintance to ask just how old she was, until that moment.

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
_Perfect Blue_ - A novel turned OVA turned Movie about stalkers, obsession, and perceived personalities of minor celebrities. The Anime is the most exciting of the lot, the least true-to-word, and frankly, the most powerful. Definitely worthy of watching if the subject doesn't immediately freak you out.


	17. Candy: Dragostea Din Tei

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#023 飴玉  
A.C. 197, June 3 「Dragostea Din Tei」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

For their first month anniversary, Donn made her candy and wrapped them in delicate pink and lilac paper. He was so proud of himself that Zechs, who have been trying his honest best to be helpful, could hardly bear to break the news to him that Noin had never, in all the years he's known her, liked sweets nor the colour pink.

"Oh, I know she'll like these," the big man grinned conspirationally, "it's how I got her in the sack the first time."

Any camaraderie the pilot had managed to build up with his mechanic over the last four weeks evaporated instantly.

"She was so moved she almost cried that first time, not," he went on to chuckle, "that our Lucy would ever actually cry."

Zechs said nothing, partly because it would be far too personal to reveal that Noin does cry, and partly because he thought it would be petty to explain that he was probably the last living person to have ever seen her do it.

Donnovan had taken to referring to Noin as 'our Lucy' with Zechs. Since she did not seem to mind his pet names, Zechs did not feel he had any ground on which to object either. After all, Donn was her boyfriend, not his. And because he was Noin's boyfriend, Zechs was on his best behaviour, trying his best not to scare him off. He knew Noin would forgive him eventually if he did blow his top one day and tore into Donn for being generally annoying, though it wouldn't be fair to the poor girl. She had enough problems finding a date without him hanging over her, from what he'd heard.

_"Have you any idea how hard it is to hook a girl up when her best friend keeps calling her up to haul his sexy ass out of space on Christmas Day?"_ His most intimate memory of Sally Po was holding her thick Eurasian braids and trying to keep his shoes clear of the line of fire as she threw up over a balcony at the Preventers' Christmas party, after making the accusation. That made him proud of Noin. She had never before had a female friend who got close enough to her to confront someone else on her behalf, albeit drunk.

It was not the first time he had realised how hard his life and decisions had been on her. He thought of her as his partner, but really, he had treated her as a faithful servant. It seemed natural to expect her unquestioning loyalty and adherence to his plans, even when he made a conscious effort not to ask it of her. She had told him repeatedly and in so many different ways that it was her honour and duty to serve that he had started to believe it, too. His death would have been the gift of freedom he had often wished to give her, and he was sure she understood as well, that day in space when he drew his sword on her. Instead, she blackmailed him into staying alive, further complicating the score.

There were times when he'd wondered what his feelings towards her are and what they would have been if he and she were not so tangled by the strings of fate. There were nights when he fretted about the reality of her emotions, and days when he wondered if whatever he has to offer would be enough. He hadn't thought it through when he told her he wasn't good enough for her and wouldn't ask her for anything until he was. Certainly, that would be his most honest sentiment. Unfortunately, it proved to be rather difficult to live by once he realised his intentions, especially with Donn playing up the part he should have taken.

He ached to talk to her the way he hadn't done since they were teenagers consulting one another on the mysteries of relating to the opposite sex. Something had changed between now and their arrival at Mars and he was afraid it had to do with him becoming a crowd. He wondered if it was because she had started sleeping with Donn, and then if she was sleeping with him at all. She made no signs of it, and he, let's put it this way, the man had picked her up and kissed her in front of everyone who cared to look the very first day the three of them met. Donn was a teddy bear's wealth in public displays of affection.

Zechs used the excuse of returning his lunch tray to escape when Noin entered the mess hall, not wanting to stick around for the lovey-dovey cooing. Moments like that have started to cut him up. Not in jealousy, although he was a little, but from the way she giggles and the suspicion that he could never do for her what Donn does. He was not a stranger to women and romance; he just couldn't be comfortable imagining putting 'the moves' to someone as close to him as his best friend. How does one go about courting a woman who has seen all the worst of you, and the colour of your food-poisoned innards?

From the corner of his eye, Zechs watched Donn present her with his offering, and the unmistakable glow on Noin's face as she gasped and kissed him gladly on the cheeks, and sighed. Donnovan was right, she did like the candy.

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
_Dragostea Din Tei_ – You will probably recognise this as the real title of the infamous "Numa" song, which translates from Romanian as "Love of the Linden Trees", "Love in Tei" or "Linden-type Love", actually a pretty meaningful poem if one gets past its hype and pop. I mean, of course, the European release version.


	18. The Way Back: Life From the Linden Trees

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#020 かえり道 & #023 飴玉 (reprisal)  
A.C. 197, June 3, 23:45pm 「Life From the Linden Trees」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

A timid knock.

"Zechs? Are you decent?"

He went towards the voice, pulling on a shirt, and smirked at Noin as the door slid open. "I can't remember the last time that's stopped you."

"Must have been around Christmas 192, when I finally admitted I could never achieve the kind of figure those naked girls you kept hiding in interesting places had."

Zechs winced. He wasn't in the mood to talk about them. Donn's first month anniversary gift to Noin had put him in a temper he hadn't quite gotten over yet.

"Are you alright?" She was at his side in an instant, reaching to gauge the temperature under his ears and pulling his brow towards hers.

"Yes." He struggled to get away a little harder than he had intended and regretted staying in for the night. He should have done what any other man would have done and gone to the bar, possibly find another one of those girls she had so casually jabbed him with. He could tell from the way she surreptitiously scanned his room that she did not believe him

"I'm fine, Noin. How can I help you?" He asked with a pathetic pang of gladness that they were spending free-time alone together, and promised the stronger, growling part of him a good ass-kicking for his weaker, puppy-eyed self later.

She was still eyeing him up in case he suddenly collapsed on her. "Are you sure?"

"Noin, I promise, if I decide to put 'meeting an unfortunate accident alone in my room' on my schedule, you'll be the first to know."

"What about the unscheduled ones?"

"I will call you." He assured her, realising how little sense he was making. "Unless it is wearing some very sexy lingerie. Then I may wait until afterwards to call you."

The silence hung between them like the recycled atmosphere in the cramped crew quarters. She sighed, shaking her head in disgust. "The best retort I can think of is getting you to call me first, but I'm afraid you'll just take it as an invitation."

Zechs fought to keep a second wince from surfacing. Time was, he enjoyed the mildly suggestive banter they threw at each other like a pair of teenaged boys and thought nothing of it. Noin still didn't, so it has to be him that had changed. The Zechs who would have grinned and told her she might like it seemed a whole different lifetime ago.

"I came by to give you something," she found them seats on the edge of his bed and sat with a bowl of spherical treats wrapped in twists of pink and lilac paper in her lap, Donn's candies. She held one out to him. There was a joy in her eyes that he had not seen in many years and he regretted that. He should be the one who found that back for her, not Donn. "Come on, try it."

He unwrapped the offering, rolling the blackish ball gingerly in his fingers. "When did you start liking sweets?"

"I didn't," Noin admitted, snatching it impatiently from him and popping it into his mouth to staunch further delays. "Just these ones. Crunch."

He obeyed out of habit to her tone of voice and bit in. The aroma that flooded his senses from inside the hard candy shell was warm Summers and cool Autumns, children's laughter ringing in his ears, as real as Noin staring intently into his face, and making yourself sick on wildberries before dinner.

"_Grand dieu_…" he identified hoarsely around the pulpy, gritty, mellow texture, the flavour of the Sanq Kingdom of his childhood. "Linden flowers…"

She nodded vigorously and handed him a second. "I don't know where or how he got them all the way out here… they spoil quickly so I couldn't save you any the last time he made them, well, the first time, really. Doesn't it just remind you…"

He cut her off by pushing the sweet between her lips, letting his fingertip linger on them seconds longer than was strictly necessary. "Tell me about Venezia. What do you remember?"

Noin closed her eyes and smiled up at him.

"There were lindens everywhere, father brought them in from the Sanq Royal Gardens to cover the fish smell. On very clear days, you can see all the way to Marche from our rooftop. The summer I turned five, you came to Luciano's birthday on the most beautiful chestnut bay and I hated you for it…"

"Her name was Polaris," he chuckled softly, "I pleaded to get her, just to spite you."

She laughed. "I've always suspected that."

"What else?"

"Sitting under the trees, counting ants in the grass instead of learning my sums," she grinned, "chess games, spying on my sisters, playfights in the courtyard… Nonno's stories about the days of old, climbing trees… falling out of trees… the sun and the wind, sailing. Mamma loved the sea, she was going to teach me when I was old enough…" she opened her eyes to blink away the brimming tears. "Remember Lichtenberg Base? You came back one day with a pocketful of linden nuts and we made ourselves sick trying to eat them…"

"Alessandra, I…"

"Don't apologise, Peacecraft," she cut him off firmly. "You'll ruin it."

He flopped into the clinical indifference of his standard issue cot, covering his melancholy with an arm across his face. She stared up at the ceiling beside him and fed him another candy, carefully not asking his memories. She knew they would be more painful than hers.

Noin's family had known what was coming to them for a long time and chose it with the pride of knights; his people were slaughtered in the span of a single morning by treachery in the dead of the night. The linden tree was the Peacecraft's family emblem, and the United Earth Sphere Alliance burnt down every last one they could find within the kingdom's borders in the aftermath. The oldest trees blazed for days. It had taken years to get the smell of it out of his nose.

"Should you be giving them all to me?" The fallen prince asked as she supplied him with an eighth consecutive.

"I've never liked candy, you know that." Noin said simply, laying her cheek against the top of his head.

"But Donn made them especially for you." It took a world of effort not to reach out and touch her.

"So don't tell him," she shrugged dismissively. "He doesn't understand. To him, it's only a variation on his grandmother's cough drops."

Zechs couldn't help it. He choked and they had to sit up so Noin could pound on his back.

"Cough drops? You'd jump in bed with someone for cough drops?"

"I was homesick and vulnerable!" She protested in a hot blush, attacking him with his pillow when he continued laughing until they were both out of breath and fell back on his sheets, spent.

"I've missed you, _mon meilleure amie_," the words tumbled out before he realised.

"I'm sorry," she replied quietly for the distance between them these past weeks, but does not explain herself.

"It's not because of me, is it?" However painful, he had to know.

She seemed genuinely surprised. "No Zechs, why would it be?"

"Because two is company but three can be a crowd?" He ventured, feeling silly.

"That's true," Noin seemed innocently thoughtful, though in reality hiding her own insecurities. "But you and I make two, Peacecraft. Always have."

Zechs rose on his elbow to look at her, struggling to think in the coy, slightly sweet nostalgia that filled the air.

"Noin, I'm about to do something that may be incredibly stupid in the light of what'd happened the last time I tried it," he declared finally. Then, without pause for a response or reconsiderations, Prince Milliardo Peacecraft pressed his lips on hers gently, stealing a taste of home.

**...**

.

**Glossary:**  
_Grand dieu_ – French "great god", as in an expression of astonishment  
_Nonno_ – Italian "Grandfather"  
_Mon meilleure amie_ – French "my best friend" (female)

**A/N:  
**_Linden Trees_ – the Linden Tree is sacred to ancient North Europeans, who believed it to be a seeker of truth and restorer of peace and justice. It is a symbol also of devotion and sometimes comparable to an Achilles' heel, in that Siegfried of the Norse traditions (a hero parallel to Achilles) receives his single point of vulnerability from a linden leaf that stuck to him unnoticed while he was bathing in dragon's blood.

And you can make chocolate by pounding linden flowers and unripe nuts together, or roast the nuts to make coffee, but linden nuts themselves are inedible, which is probably why they made themselves sick in Lichtenberg. You'd think he'd have known better.


	19. Excess Chain: Cold

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#013 余計な鎖  
A.C. 197, June 9, 10:56「Cold」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

They were spread thin that morning due to a mass bout of food poisoning traced back to an iffy shipment of protein substitute. Several non-essential areas of the ship were deserted, as a result, with all available manpower being redirected towards the medical bays.

"I told you that stuff will be the death of us," Zechs observed. Noin would have chuckled, but there were other things on her mind. As one of the few teams that were on duty off base during lunch and dinner the previous day, they were stuck picking up the slack.

Noin grabbed a list of priority maintenances and fled into space. She was never good around sick people, unlike Zechs.

One of the most baffling items was trimming a length of chain near one of the stabilising gravity boosters that was causing a god-awful ruckus every time that particular generator fired up. _Clang, clang, clang,_ it went, slapping into what was basically a giant electromagnet.

This was baffling because it was such a paltry design error it should never have occurred in the first place, and because the official justification for the rush on this work order was 'public nuisance'. _Whose quarters are these overhead?_ She had to wonder, coming up alongside the problem area. _And what strings are they pulling to get this through?_

She could think of a few things that needed improving in her quadrant too.

"You'll want to get it over your grip, not below, and squeeze the cutters…"

Donn was passing step-by-step instructions over the intercom. Noin considered muting him. She could do without his backseat driving— the habit was really starting to get to her— but it helped ease her mind a little to have the background chatter, not to mention turning off communications would be a breach of safety protocol. She was going to be enough trouble as it was when they found out she hadn't bothered to put on a spacesuit.

"Go easy, Lucy, firm but gentle. Remember, firm but gentle…"

_Clang. Clang. Clang._ Noin sighed. _Why did he have to go… argh! _She wasn't sure who she was angrier with. Zechs for what he did to her in his room, or herself for running away afterwards like a skittish colt. _And how does he act so calm afterwards, as though nothing had happened?_

"… like a kiss…"

The shriek of twisting metal blasted through the intercom as an impact shudder raked through most of the sector over the booster. Donn threw down his headphones with a cry of pain of his own and pressed them back against his ringing ears as quickly as he could.

He was greeted by a string of vicious foreign words on the other end.

"Lucy? Lu! What's going on?"

She said a word, it definitely sounded like she was swearing. "The booster… " Her voice cackled in flatly, the rest of her sentence rendered unintelligible under the hackling ambient noise.

Donn uttered a bad word of his own, scrambling for the security monitors.

"I'm going to try pull up a visual on you, Lucy. What's going on down there?" He continued yelling over the intercom, receiving nothing but metallic groans and electrical static in response.

"Turn off the booster, Donnovan," The other member of their team materialised at his elbow.

Donn stared at Zechs, dazed at his sudden appearance. "Why? It should be off. And how did you...?"

"I felt it kick in. Turn it off, now."

The cameras chose this moment to locate Noin's Mobile Suit, plastered to the side of the gravity generator housing.

"Lucy? Can you hear me? We're going to get you out of there…" He fumbled blindly at the controls on his station, sounding up the alarm.

"She can't hear you," the stoic tones of the blond pilot cut through his rising horror. "Her comms would be jammed by the EM-field. Who's the idiot that let her go out there in a Hopper?... Hello, Engineering please."

Donn twisted in his seat to find Zechs on the emergency hotline, telling the operator calmly that yes, he will hold, as though he was asking for bus times.

He fixed his eyes back on the yellow-and-black striped machine known as the Hopper, the standard suit used for general maintenance in space. Basically a cheap box on a telescopic quadrupled frame, the Hopper was mass-produced from scrap metal and sacrificed bulky components such as shield generators and heavy plating to compensate for the weight of junk alloy and preserve manoeuvrability. Four of its five arms are easily adaptable to a number of tasks through interchangeable attachments, with a fifth prehensile limb extending from directly below the main controls for precision tasks, the Suit gains its nickname from its resemblance to a frog when collapsed into storage, and apparently, while fully extended and pinned by immobilising forces. Donn paled as he realised what Zechs' eyes were narrowed on.

"How soon can we send a retrieval team?"

"Merquise," He whispered, in case she could hear. "Merquise, the hanger's operating at three percent capacity. It'll be thirty minutes before we can get anything ready to go out there… she's already venting atmosphere. She's not going to make it…"

Two men in the light blue overalls of the engineering department burst into the control room. Zechs pushed the bright red receiver he had been listening intently into at one of the men and yanked Donn away from his station with surprising strength.

The cord stretched and Donn's headphones snapped off his head, bouncing loudly off the panels, nearly ripping his ears off. By the time the pain set in, he was already in the hanger, where the panic had yet to begin.

"Get me launched, please. This Suit will do."

Sheldon Donnovan, Mechanic First-Class, partner to pilots Noin and Merquise, sputtered as the smaller man shoved him towards a Hopper sitting in the maintenance bay.

"That's crazy! We don't even know what condition it's in! If we can get down to engineering and help shut the generator down, maybe she'll be able to get to Hanger C, that's her best chance. She's got ten minutes left, probably, and it'll take that long to reach her at least…" He floundered in the feeling of helplessness as Zechs zipped himself into a spacesuit with no more agitation than a man straightening his tie to step into the office on any other routine morning.

"I can do it in three. The Suit will hold. I've only just worked on it."

"There's nothing you can do for her with the generators still on!" He protested, even as he helped Zechs pack a second spacesuit and boost him into the Hopper. It hadn't even occurred to him to ask how he knew she had gone out without one.

Zechs smirked. "Watch closely, then, Sheldon Donnovan, and I will show you a miracle."

Donn could have been knocked over by a feather.

"You're _laughing_? How can you be enjoying this? Someone's life is at stake!" He slammed down the seals on top of the Hopper's cockpit, shaking his head, and punched through the launch sequence. "The rumours are true," he hissed into the intercom, bitterly disappointed. "You are a cold-blooded animal."

The young pilot blinked at his mechanic, considered the explanations coming to mind, and shrugged. Noin was right, Donn wouldn't understand.

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
Following up on the stolen kiss was remarkably difficult, despite all the plans I'd made prior ^^; If you've checked in the last few days, this is I think the third version posted in as many days? lol Originally I'd intended to just do the regular 30kisses thing, take a theme, take a kiss, throw it all in, and don't worry about anything. But then plot got in the way. And continuity. And symbolism. And... and...

So yea. I'm sorry this turned out more serious than I'd originally intended and if you'll bear with me, I'll try to have it all make sense as though I'd intended all this all along by the end lol


	20. A World Belonging to Two: U R Not Alone

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#008 二人の世界  
A.C. 197, June 9, 11:02「**-//*-*//-*/---/-//*-/*-**/---/-*/*//」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

_Marsprojekt_ Security Officer Lucrezia Noin exhausted her vocabulary of Italian vulgarities kicking herself in the head. It wouldn't have taken more than a minute to put on her spacesuit, but she had been either too proud or too stupid to spend that minute, she had not yet decided which, with Zechs in the changing room. All she could think about, spotting that luxurious platinum blond mane cascading down the back of his slender, sculpted, shoulders, was her need to get as far away from him as possible. So much so, in fact, that she had hopped into the first Suit available on the hanger floor without a second thought.

_Stop thinking about him, damn you, it was only a kiss for the sake of old times. You have a boyfriend. He is married. Une is going to find Lady Anatolie. And the Prince and the Princess will live Happily Ever After. The End._

She should be more concerned about her current situation, really. It was pride that stopped her from doubling back and changing Suits once she'd realised where her next task was going to be. Working near a gravity booster in a Hopper was one of the first things she had been taught not to do in her third year at Lake Victoria Specials' Academy.

Gravity generators were basically giant electromagnets, attached to various parts of a colony or ship to occasionally correct, or stabilise, balance and gravity both internally and externally. Without the protection of shields or non-conductive plating, both of which were absent in the Hopper's basic design, one could easily run into situations like… this: being pinned to the magnetised generator housing like an etherised frog on an autopsy board.

The force was more than the stripped-down machine can fend off and none of her instruments can be expected to work. She had abandoned her radio after the initial attempt to get through to Donn on the other end. Either they were having trouble shutting down the booster, or he hadn't been able to make out her message at all. It made little difference. Noin was mortified. She had thought she would be a good enough pilot to get away with it. She'd kept up with the Gundam boys and Zechs' Tallgeese in a mass-produced Taurus, for heaven's sake! And she would have, if she hadn't gotten distracted by the memory of Zechs' kiss and slipped towards the generator, causing it to kick on.

_What's wrong with you?_ She shook herself mentally. How did it go from kicking his head in and calling him a metal-plated idiot to… to this, making a big fool of herself with ridiculously amateur mistakes, all lovelorn, and this dry sobbing in a stranded Mobile Suit like some dime store romance heroine? "Oh no, Noin," she mumbled quietly through clenched teeth, feeling the squeeze around her head and ribs. "Nonononono, you are not going to pieces on me. You are not going to cry, damn you, NO!"

But it wasn't the shame and frustration, she realised after a few deep breaths. She was losing atmosphere. She chuckled at herself, thinking how silly she was being to be more worried about bursting into tears than suffocating. A few quick sums in her head estimated her lifespan to be up to ten minutes. _Oh joy,_ she thought to herself in false cheer,_ And she hasn't even made it to her twenty-first birthday yet._ On the other hand, that's three years more than the average OZ MS-pilot.

The breach was minute and she could slow it down with some medical sealant. It was a shame blowtorches were considered too hazardous for carrying onboard, it could easily solve all of her problems… _Yes, by spontaneously combusting in the sudden pressure change and blowing your head off. What have you got to lose? You've already lost your mind…_ Sometimes, she really hated being alone with herself.

She has been in worse situations, she was sure of it; as long as 'worse' defined itself in the life-threatening sense and steered clear of the embarrassment factor.

She wondered what was going on up there. Had Donn sounded the alarm? Were they trying to reach her on the comm? Will they get there minutes after she'd run out of air? Or will she stay crucified here for days like a bug spatter until they get around to peeling her off the side? _How the hell am I going to explain this to Une?_ And Zechs, when will he find out? What will he do?

This time, she was sure the stab in her chest was caused by her breaking heart. It had been hurting for a while, she just hadn't allowed herself the space and time to pay any attention to it. She gasped through the lump in her throat. It was too soon to start decompression sickness. Seven minutes to go.

The other day, Donn, in his infinite soppiness, had asked her what she would spend her time doing is she had only one day to live.

"I'd spend the day making sure it wouldn't be my last, of course," she'd smiled, which apparently was considered cheating.

It wasn't that she had a problem thinking about death. If anything, it was how to stop thinking about it that eluded her. As a soldier, as a _survivor_, she was painfully familiar to its reality and its necessity. And so, as a human being, she is vehemently opposed to the needless infliction of death. It was disrespectful to that great force of nature.

She had never thought about how she would like to die. A long time ago, she had made an oath that took the decision out of her hands, so she should be trying harder to stay alive… _But what's the point? It was dissolved seventeen months and fifteen days ago. You've just been too stubborn to acknowledge this. After all, what are you going to do with yourself now that you are no longer a valued vassal of the Prince of Sanq? Who would you be and where would you go?_

She could no longer bring herself to care if the difficulty in her breathing was physical or psychological. Her head hurt from holding back the tears and it felt as though she was drowning inside. She could not admit that she would be lost without a man to give her purpose. Noin closed her eyes and wished for her last six minutes to end. This is all a death is, in the end, a world occupied by one, alone.

_Clang, clang, clang… clang, clang, clang… clang…_ That damned chain she had been out here to cut was banging up against the generator again. How like the sound of her OZ dress sword in its scabbard, knocking up against another. The cadets in their year had adopted the archaic Morse code, rattling it out on whatever was on hand to carry their secret messages. It hit her with another pang to realise that she had gone two years without thinking about her old school friends, and their pact to commemorate every one of them who has fallen over the years every March, in Lake Victoria. _Who's keeping The List these days?_ She wondered. Would she be on it?

The nerve-wreaking screech of something on metal made her wince, and she wondered what terrible things the gravity generator must be doing to the Hopper. It sounded way too close for comfort. Maybe she will be crushed to death and spared the torture of suffocation in space. _Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang… _

She counted it off, pretending it was Morse code to amuse herself. Five, six if you counted the scratch. Six for Zechs. Tch, she should have known she wouldn't keep him off her mind for long.

_Scratch, clang, scratch…_ K… Wait, how is the chain getting free to swing back like that? It was hard to think with the fog in her brain. What was making the other sound anyway? _Scratch, clang, scratch…_ No, not 'K', an… invitation to transmit?

The fist over her stomach tightened and in that split second it seemed her soul would leap out of her mortal shell. _Zechs._ Pulling herself together was harder than she'd expected. Somehow, she managed to find enough strength to kick thrice at the hutch of her prison, praying silently that it was enough and that she hadn't damaged the pressure seals.

There was the thumping again. _M… V… Q… 4…_ Manoeuvre Q-4… _Rescue manoeuvre four?_ She chocked, though it could have been on the thin air. Rescue manoeuvre four was part of her Final Project for the Applied Astro-Science elective she took up her last year at Lake Victoria. Her project had involved a series of theoretical preventions and solutions to life-threatening situations that may occur to space workers. Ironically, being pinned to a gravity booster in a Hopper was not one of her considered hazards.

Rescue manoeuvre four was devised at the very last minute on the day she handed in her project, for the sole purpose of having a slightly longer paper than the other students, and primarily on a sugar high. It was sheer madness, and had never, to the best of her knowledge, even been simulated. She had no other options.

_Since loss of consciousness due to exposure to vacuum does not occur until approximately 9 to 12 seconds into full exposure, _she had written,_ and experiments have shown that patients have an average 49% chance of full recovery in cases of vacuum exposure of no more than 90 seconds, there is therefore a possible rescue window of 9 to 90 seconds over short distances for vacuum-stranded civilians._

Noin crossed her fingers and waited. Nothing in her life had ever prepared her for this. There, the snap-hiss of the pressure seals releasing the last of her air into the vast void of space. The vertigo hit her like a tonne of bricks and she almost toppled over as the universe welcomed her with its vampiric kiss.

_Manoeuvre 4 calls for 2 or more experienced personnel to transfer victims into a safe and stable environment when victims cannot be reached without significant breach of atmosphere._

Strong, familiar, hands reached in and steadied her. Something slipped under her arms. Every twitch of a muscle was an uphill battle.

_The rescuers will have 9 to 12 seconds of victim co-operation in which to retrieve the victim to an accessible position._

She wasn't sure how long it has been, or if it was really happening at all. Darkness danced on the edge of everything, as though she were fully exposed to space. She was vaguely aware of a sensation, like giant leeches nursing on every inch of her skin. If she's in space, why is there gravity? Why isn't she floating? She wanted to giggle.

There was a distant rumble of something, and everything fell away.

_Rescuers will have 80 seconds after the loss of consciousness in which to fully seal the victim into a stable, atmosphere-controlled environment._

Once the Hopper's atmosphere was vented, there was no way to re-pressurise the cockpit. He had known this coming out, which was what the spacesuit was for.

He tugged her along the guy-line he had set up, cramming her into the extra suit as fast as he could. The helmet would come last because, if he remembered his science fiction right, the stories about exploding someone's head by giving them air before putting them in a contained pressurised environment may just be true.

Times like these, Zechs missed the Tallgeese with its optimally conditioned cockpit, full range tracking sensors and anti-trackers, and, most importantly, armaments. He wasn't sure who or what he would use them on first, Noin for being as jaw-droppingly stupid as she'd been, or Donn for letting her, or the owner of the _Marsprojekt_ for all the trivial little problems that caused Noin to be out here in the first place.

Wasn't it the first lesson at Lake Victoria when heading out into space to never board a Hopper without a spacesuit? And wasn't the second not to bring a Hopper close to any sort of massive energy generating equipment? At least the _Marsprojekt_ stocked top of the line spacesuits to make up for its shoddy fleet of maintenance-use Mobile Suits.

The light on her chest turned green finally as he settled her into his Hopper. Grabbing her wrist for the controls welded into her suit, he scrolled through the menus for first-aid medical attention and scowled at his options. _Allergies, flu, hives… _list by symptom, not drug. He had not expected this. The flashing red digits on his own wrist-control jumped, blasting a high-pitched series of beeps in his ears. Forced to make a decision, he stabbed blindly at '_heart attack_' and prayed to God that he hadn't just killed her.

Hopefully that would be enough. It had to be, because Noin had lost consciousness and he was going to be very angry if he could not yell at her when she wakes up.

**...**

.

**Glossary:**  
**-//*-*//-*/---/-//*-/*-**/---/-*/*// - Morse code "U R Not Alone"  
_Clang, clang, clang… clang, clang, clang… clang…_ - Morse code. "Me". Zechs' first attempt at contacting Noin uses a group of 3 knocks to symbolise a dash. Obviously this is not a very good idea, so he switches to that scratching noise instead.

**A/N:**

The science in the above story is FICTIONAL. Kids, do not try this at home. SF-buffs, try to remember this was concocted by someone whose experience with space is limited to the sci-fi channel and wikipedia; which means, don't claw out your eyes and scream at how horribly wrong it all is, tell me why it's wrong too.


	21. Fence: But You

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#025 フェンス  
A.C. 197, June 10, 2:12「But You」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

Even though it would have been easier to pick her up in his arms like an invalid or throw her over his shoulder like a sack, Zechs could not do that to her. Instead, he supported her, one arm braced cross her back and one of hers slung across his shoulders, and half-carried, half-dragged, her from the Hopper into the Medical Bay's Intensive Care Unit, under the unnaturally silent gaze of everyone else en route.

There wasn't a large crowd, mainly because those who do care about what had been going on with the gravity booster outside were currently milling anxiously around Hanger A. Once the news spreads, they will quickly migrate here to sector C. Zechs could care less. They wouldn't be coming because of him.

Noin woke up in a room that was at once strange and familiar. The plain wooden bowl on the nightstand told her where she was, and she threw up over the side of the bed.

A white-robed pixie of a woman stepped in around the time she was done, and observed her with a critical, piercing-green eye. "How are you feeling?"

"What am I doing in Zechs' room?"

Doctor Teryl Rothery regarded the ashen, bruised, woman with a perfectly arched eyebrow. She had just come back from the dead and that was the first thing she asks, 'what am I doing in his room'?

"You had too much to drink last night and came home with my boyfriend," she replied wryly, "you screwed like bunnies and then you passed out and he went to work and I came over, so now, here we are."

She noted the expressions of shock and concentration fly across the young woman's face, paying close attention to her eye movements as the brunette glanced about the room, and the twitches of the muscles in her throat as she licked her lips and tried to swallow.

"I… that's not how I remember it…" Noin scowled, struggling to remember. The mirage standing at the foot of the bed wore a nametag she could not quite make out, her head was spinning so much. She hadn't known Zechs had found a girlfriend, but he was so intensely private that that would not have been a big surprise. He would kill her if she ruined things for him with this gorgeous redhead… Noin forced herself to focus. She was sure she has seen her around the ship before… …

"No," she winced finally under the assault of painful memories. "No… there was an accident… gravity booster in grid C-F5… Doctor… Ross?"

Her and Zechs? It was not possible. They had gotten drunk together plenty of times before and nothing had happened, whether she'd wanted it to or not. For a moment, the angel with the fiery hair seemed unconvinced and Noin began to wonder if she was the one who was mistaken.

"Rothery. Alright, nothing wrong with your memory, then." The Doctor made more notes on her clipboard. Noin felt strangely disappointed.

She stepped up around the opposite side of where Noin had been sick and shone a penlight into her eyes, noting the dilation. "Do you remember your name?"

"Ah… Lucrezia… Lucrezia Noin." She had almost used her real name.

"Well, Lucrezia, for the first woman in history to survive space-vacuum in a non-experimental conditions, you're doing pretty well, in case you're wondering."

Noin tried to blink, and had to stop. Even her eyelids were bruised.

"As for 'here', Mr. Merquise thought you would like some privacy to recover in, so he moved you from Med Bay once you were no longer critical. Said you hate being around sick people."

Noin's ears burned in a fierce blush. Hearing those words from a Doctor made her feel ashamed. "I… I never know what to do around them…"

"It's okay," Doctor Rothery smiled. "You feel helpless around them, so you avoid them. I understand that feeling. It's why I became a doctor."

Noin shrugged lightly. "I know what to do with the injured, and I'm fine with blood and guts, it's just the diseases. I never know how to help."

"Mr. Merquise is something else," the Doctor changed the topic conversationally, preparing an IV-bag. "Even at the risk of your life, he seemed more concerned about your pride than anything else. Had to carry you in on your feet himself. He really is a good…"

"Zechs' isn't my boyfriend." Noin interrupted, blaming the stinging in her eyes on the prick of the IV-needle.

Rothery gave her another calculating look. "I was going to say 'partner'," she said lightly. "Lovers come and go, but a partner who truly knows all about what you want and respects that, no matter the consequence, that's something to treasure."

She smiled at Noin's stunned silence. "An old soldier told me this when I was working clean-up after the Eve Wars."

_A partner who truly knows what you want, huh?_ Hot tears fell unbidden into her lap. Can she attest to that? She thought she did, once upon a time, but ever since the Eve War… maybe she shouldn't have saved him from the Libra explosion. Not because he did not deserve it, nor because he has suffered for it, but because he did not wish for it. He had been willing to risk her life for the sake of her pride. Could she say the same? _You wouldn't even let him die on his own terms…_

She didn't know what he thought. They hadn't spoken about it.

Just as they hadn't spoken about the kiss days ago in this room, or his incomprehensible self-explanation the other night when she found a withered gardenia in the jacket she had stolen from him years ago. They hadn't spoken nearly enough since he threw her out of his hospital room on Christmas Day, A.C. 195.

_Should I have gone looking for you, Zechs?_ It seemed hardly fair, he had been the one at fault. She had given him his life back, for Christmas, and he had told her to _Go Away_… he had said… what did he say?

"_Sanq is fallen and will never rise again. Relena and I have accepted this, so must you. You have done more than enough. There is no obligation left between us, Lucrezia. Go live your life the way God intended."_

So she went back to Earth with the only people she knew, in the world after the War, and started doing the only thing she knew to do with her life. It wasn't so different from what she did for Zechs, for Milliardo Peacecraft. She protected his people and fought for his dream, the dream of Universal Peace that King Leopold Peacecraft the Fourth had started almost twenty-five years ago. Was it even Zechs' own, true, wish?

Then he came back.

"Go tow _that man_ back, Noin." Lady Une's voice ordered wearily over the phone. "He says he won't trust anyone to do it but you."

What else could she have done? Without the Sanq Kingdom, without the obligation of Master and Servant between them, there was no Zechs-and-Noin. They were an invention of Milliardo Peacecraft and Alessandra diLuculo's, for the sole purpose of recapturing the visions of their childhoods.

"Zechs. It's been a year and two days since we've last met." She said, negating Christmas Day, reversing Christmas Eve. These two missing days clung and fluttered indistinctly in the air between them, like a membrane, alternatively suffocating and obfuscating.

Doctor Rothery left in search of house-keeping. When the door beeped and slid open again, Noin expected one of the janitors with a bucket and mop, not the usual resident of the room she had taken up.

The gulf between them was sowed with questions unasked and answers unsaid, land mines scattered across its distance.

He didn't seem to notice.

"It worked, we pulled it off! Rescue Manoeuvre Four… we made it work!" The first thing she saw was the big, wide grin carved into his face. She hadn't seen such a grin since they were children. It was good to see it again. The second thing she took in was the discoloured swell around the corner of it.

"Zechs, you got in a fight?"

"Ah…" he chuckled sheepishly, "I deserved it. You were in ICU and I couldn't stop grinning. Don't tell Donn Q-4 was your idea, he's sworn to kill the idiot who came up with it."

She could see the fear in his eyes, tucked behind his enthusiastic welcome. She could feel it. The near-hysterical excitement, the casual laugh, it was all a disguise for the little boy underneath, about the burst into tears any minute. And it was her fault. Noin dropped her eyes to where her hands were picking nervously at his sheets.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, for everything she has done, not knowing what else to say.

He shifted his weight and sobered, becoming the grown-up Zechs, though he does not move from his spot. "Noin, I don't know if I ought to kiss you or shoot you."

She managed a little smile for him.

"I don't care, I'm just glad to see you. But do it quick, because the state I'm in, either's going to hurt like hell."

**...**

.

**A/N:**

The BGM for this kiss is "Call and Answer" by the Bare-Naked Ladies.

Two missing days – This comes from my overly paranoid and suspicious mind. In EW, Noin tells Zechs that they haven't met up in a year and two days… but afterwards, in Brussels, our always concise Noin turns around and says the infamous line:  
いいえ　一年前に私は言った筈です。「彼方のそばから離れない」。  
Iie, ichinen mae ni watashi wa itte hasu desu. Anata no soba kara hanarenai  
_No, I should have said this a year ago. 'I won't walk away from you'_. (lit. 'not leave from near you'.)  
A year ago? What happened to the 2 extra days? Hm.


	22. Kiss: And I

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#030 キス  
A.C. 197, June 9, 10:30:「And I」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

...

Zechs was glad that Noin had not killed him for kissing her… yet. He was also surprised to rediscover his sense of self-preservation in such a childish exaggeration.

For a moment, as his lips touched hers and he drowned in the taste of linden flowers on her skin, he had been afraid. Suppose it felt like kissing his sister, or worse, if she felt like she was his sister, then what? It was wholly possible, considering their long history together and her tendency to fluster whenever someone suggested a romantic connection between them.

It was every bit as soft and sweet as he'd imagined it to be— just the way he'd always known her to be beneath the exterior of the tough, cool, woman he has come to rely on— and they had stared at each other, flushed and breathless, and she had bolted like a spooked animal.

He waited for her to offer some kind of explanation. It would be unkind and boorish to press her for it, given the look on her face. He has been waiting nearly a week.

Things seemed normal between them, at least, as normal as they have been on Mars, which meant he saw little of her outside of work while he went out of his way to avoid bumping into her and Donn in his free time, and his interactions with her, though in reality fraught with angst and ambiguity, remained casual and intuitive.

He tried to see himself as others did and wondered if that was what she saw: a brilliant, stoic, man who guarded his privacy ferociously, and somehow despite that, a supremely charismatic leader by nature; no longer the insecure, unapologetic, boy so wound up in his pain and anger that he hadn't noticed he was loved until he'd destroyed it with his own hands. Perhaps that was still who he was in her mind, and although she forgives him for it, it was all she will ever see.

_How much damage can one little kiss do?_ He sighed, the sound echoing through the empty hanger like the long wash of the tide.

This melancholy does not suit him. Who was '_he_' anyway? With Sanq lost, Crown Prince Milliardo Peacecraft no longer existed and he, as the man who had allowed that golden Kingdom to fall a second time in his lifetime, had no more right to that name than a random stranger on the streets. As for Zechs Merquise, that was a fiction conjured by an eight year-old purely for the sake of avenging the two hundred and sixteen years of proud history so casually swept under the carpet by the United Earth Sphere Alliance and its mastermind, the Romefeller Foundation.

It wasn't even a particularly _good_ moniker. The real Zechs Merquise was the outlaw hero of a romance novel popular in the Sanq Kingdom of the early 170s, a brazen young Marquis swindled out of his home and honour by an insidious, militant, rival, and eventually won the day with words of love and reason against the violence of Court intrigue. The authoress was plainly a Heero Yuy admirer.

He hadn't planned on any of what happened after the Eve War. He was supposed to be dead. Relena was to be the world's heroine, rising from the ashes of violence to lead the people to Universal Peace. That was why he took on the mantle of the Fenrir, why he led the White Fang and tried to crash Libra into Earth. Someone had to play the beast for the Princess to tame, and he did not trust Treize to stick to the script. Already, he had deviated from their plans by relieving her of her position as Queen of the World.

Zechs invented a new identity and tried to fade away. And then, Treize, again.

He knew better than to place himself back in Lady Une's crosshairs, but Relena's circumstances were dire and he did not have the leisure to go sneaking around stealing the Talgeese III from the Preventers. He should have disappeared immediately, but until he saw the look on Noin's face as she slipped out of the Taurus and ran up to him in the snow in the wake of Mariemaia's surrender, he hadn't realised just how much he'd missed her. Surely a few days… three days became six weeks.

"_I should have said this a year ago. I will not walk away from you."_

It was more than he deserved, and he dared not ask for anything more. That month and a half with her was nice, as if their year of silence never happened. He had not expected to be forgiven for sending her away, after she'd pulled him from the Libra's wreck. He was angry and confused, and had said things he did not mean. She would not let him apologise. She never lets him apologise.

Sometimes the memory resurfaces and it hurts him that he could have resented her for saving his life, or been petty enough to think the lack of offerings on his grave was her way of saying she has forgotten him. He tried to make himself useful around her. Joining the Preventers was never part of his plan. The whole idea was too much like being in OZ, living under Treize's shadow, though he thought nothing of helping out with Noin's work. When Lady Une put him on her payroll, he knew he had lingered too long.

"Where would we go?" Noin had asked, and he thought to himself that it would be selfish to let her come with him. She should be her own person and have her own happiness, regardless of what he wants, and he suspected that she will never let herself do that so long as he existed.

So he had left a note on her mirror, where she would see. _Breathe,_ he wrote, picturing her frustration. It was kinder this way.

_Don't be held captive_.

Trusting she will understand.

Afterwards, he will be told that what he'd actually written translated more accurately as "need air. Not kidnapped", which had caused her to wreak her brains for days. Fortunately, he had never thought to impress her by attempting complete conversations in Italian.

Zechs distracted himself from his embarrassment by focusing on tightening a particularly stubborn bolt.

This time, they sent Noin. She always had a way of bringing him back down to earth.

He was certain that Treize had left instructions for Lady Une to keep him there, though to what end, he had not been able to guess before…

Before he'd kissed Lucrezia Noin.

_If you don't have a dream in your heart that you can follow, why not follow mine?_ Zechs Merquise famously petitioned the Empress of his homeland in Caerulea Surgere's novel. One of Milliardo's most vivid memories of life amongst the Khushrenada clan was the debate he and Treize had gotten into as Anatolie Dauphina Khushrenada tried to educate her rowdy sibling and fiancé on the finer points of being a gentleman.

Milliardo thought it deceitful; Treize found it inspirational. This started another argument, their previous scuffle forgotten, and Anatolie had left the room in disgust, declaring them both incorrigible.

Zechs tried not to laugh when a stern-faced Une, sitting behind her desk as the Head of the Preventer Agency, told him that it was those words, uttered to her by Lord Treize on the eve of the OZ Revolution, that secured her fervour to The Vision. It would have been terribly impolite, not to mention that in the end, Treize had been right.

There _were_ people in the world who were better served pursuing the dreams of others than finding one of their own, Treize had proven it amply through Lady Une and Dorothy Catalonia. But there were those who needed their own direction, too, like, ironically, his own daughter.

_An incompetant father's wish for a world in which he could kiss his only child good night, Treize?_ Zechs wiped his hands and leaned his head against the cool metal of the Hopper Suit he was working on. Would it be presumptuous to think that he did understand, despite not being a father?

The freedom to love was a dream completely incongruous to the Men of War that they had let the world around them turn them into. Looking out at the stars and remembering the linden trees, what they all used to be and had wanted to be, he realised quietly, to himself, "You did it. It really is a new world out there, Treize."

Though it was not exactly what Zechs wanted for himself, he thanked his foster brother all the same.

Zechs' dreams for the world, in this moment, were simple: he wanted a bath, some real, honest, food, and to hear Noin say sincerely that everything was perfect. And then, he wanted to kiss her again.

**...**

.

**A/N:  
**Tying up loose ends before launching into the final story arc…

Zechs' message on Noin's mirror – If you check back to story 2, Zechs scribbled "Aerare. Non rapito" on Noin's bathroom mirror (in her favourite lipstick no less) when he tried to sneak off to Mars the first time. This clears up what he'd intended with that rather nonsensical statement "Need air. Not kidnapped."

Translation gripe – Most English translations of EW give Noin's line in Brussels as "No, I said so a year ago, I won't leave you". This is not exactly true. As per the previous A/N, what she _actually_ says is:  
"No, I should have said this a year ago. 'I won't walk away from you'. (lit. 'not leave from near you'.)"  
Maybe it's negligible, but to me, _hasu_ makes all the difference. _I should have said this. I won't walk away from you._


	23. Number 10: Rota Fortunae

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#010 - #10  
A.C. 197, August 11 「Rota Fortunae」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

Few pilots get away with not having a little bit of superstitious faith. When you are flying above the world every day in something that weighs, on average, heavier than a houseful of bricks, you have to believe that something a little more than nuts and science keeps you in the air. For Zechs, it was the Tarot.

On days such as these, when the unknown pressed uneasily against his chest, he turns to drawing a card from the richly illustrated pack of cards he kept in their velvet sheath, as much for the meditative distraction as the guided comfort. Picture him now, seated before his pathetic excuse of a desk in perfect poise and posture, damp hair pushed back, a towel thrown across his bare shoulders, left over from his shower. Watch him withdraw into that quiet other-world, all his own, eyes lightly lidded, tugging free an antique plasticard from its fellows. He is well aware of how feminine the effect is, having picked up the practice from his mother.

There is a moment where time stands still, before he opens his eyes to study his choice.

_Rota Fortunae_, the Wheel of Fortune. Capricious fate, role-reversal, the rise and fall of things. _But for whom?_

He put it out of mind until half-way through lunch, when Donn and Noin stormed into the Mess Hall in the midst of what looked to be a heated argument. She is magnificent in her indignation, always has been. Zechs allowed himself a small, vague jealousy at Donn and thought against pretending not to notice, since, by now, everyone in the Mess Hall was staring, though only those seated closest could hear the words exchanged.

He caught her by the upper arm and hissed something close to her ear, prompting her to pick up a convenient glass and toss all of its dark green contents in his face. Zechs winced sympathetically. It was an instinctual male response, like cringing when another man, regardless of how you felt about them, is kicked in the groin.

Donn retreated. Zechs turned his lunch tray at a ninety-degree angle and nudged it gently towards the opposite side of his table as Noin skulked towards him. Zechs was not a difficult man to spot. In any bustling Mess Hall, he would be the man left with a whole table to himself while others took turns sharing seats. He knew better than to utter the first word as she descended upon his fries, seething with all the intensity of a lightning storm.

She growled something and helped herself to his drink. Zechs raised an elegant, perfectly composed, eyebrow at her language.

"He found out about your Space Guild proficiency exam." He guessed coolly, in a statement rather than a question.

"Of all the arrogant, chauvinistic… gah! I'll show him 'busting his balls'!" She fumed, stabbing at empty air with a deep-fried potato finger.

"First-Class, then. Congratulations." Zechs chewed nonchalantly on a stick of vegetable from his tray. He wasn't sure what vegetable it was supposed to be, and he wasn't sure he would want to find out.

"Thank you," Noin accepted curtly. "I'm glad there is still one man in my life who does not feel threatened by my achievements."

It started innocently enough, with Noin's weeks of recovery from her little adventure in naked space. To alleviate the boredom between her physiotherapy sessions, Donn suggested she take up something from the Continuing Education programme, a plan which she appeared to abandon after an hour and a half of browsing through the courses being offered. At least, that was what Donn thought.

Zechs risked a light smirk. "That's because I know I'm better."

Sheldon Donnovan, Space Guild First-Class, the best mechanic assigned to a security team aboard the _Marsprojekt_, was livid because had not expected to walk into a special Guild convene to find his girlfriend taking up the floor. He had thought he was being invited, as a resident Guild member, to observe a routine Offer of Membership.

The Space Guild was, in a nutshell, _the_ definitive Union for space-faring engineers and mechanics throughout the Earth Sphere, its success witnessed most commonly by the fact that it had survived the twenty years of communication ban between the colonies more or less intact, despite its major membership being segregated in their permanent residences in space. The Guild determined and policed engineering regulations and standards, including the proficiency level of whosoever wished to be subject to their examinations, and extended its elite membership only to those who qualified for the honour of First or Second class. Sheldon Donnovan was considered young when he achieved his First-Class designation last year, at age twenty-eight, and had fought fiercely most of his life to get to that point.

Lucrezia Noin, to the best of most knowledge, had studied three weeks and requested a Guild examination in the fourth. She was almost twenty-one.

He could barely contain himself long enough for the videoconference to be over. The second the Guild Officials winked off screen, he turned on her and exploded.

"He was the one who suggested I look into further accreditation, and he said, oooh do you know what he said?" Noin plowed on ahead with her rant, deliberately ignoring Zechs' attempt to redirect her attention. "'I thought you'd do some poetry, or learn to cook. Something lady-like'… Mio Dio! _Lady-like?..._"

"You're being too hard on him, Noin," Zechs said mildly after three minutes of gushing along a similar vein. "The man has just lost onboard exclusivity to his Guild title, be more considerate. It must have been quite a big shock for him, being unseated by you before he even realised you were a threat. It's not easy losing your place as 'the best'. Why didn't you tell him you were sitting for the Guild exam?"

"I didn't want to say anything to anyone until I knew for certain I hadn't disgraced myself. It's the first time I've been tested by any board outside of Lake Victoria…" She mewed miserably.

"You told me," he pointed out, as cold and stoic as ever.

She opened her mouth to protest, then jumped to her feet all of a sudden, anger suffused in every muscle.

"Whose side are you on anyway?" She yelled, and strode briskly away before she could blurt out anything more.

Zech leapt after her, against his male instincts, and caught up with her in the corridor outside the Mess Hall. "Noin…"

"Forget it, Zechs, just stay away from me." She hissed, like a cornered cat.

Zechs Merquise would not be daunted. Either of their rooms would be too far, and there was virtually no privacy aboard this ship. _Ah, there_. He grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her into a nearby janitorial-closet.

He doesn't ask "Noin, what's wrong with you?" He doesn't say "Noin, you're being a cow". He said, in a low, steady, tone, _"Svala, tell me what's going on."_

Noin closed her eyes, it was painful to hear him use that name, as though he had reached into her chest and ripped out her organs himself.

"Don't…" she whispered in a voice made hoarse by an impending breakdown. "I don't understand you, Peacecraft. Sometimes it seems you want me, and then you push me into someone else's arms, and to see you work so hard at it… No, you don't get to call me that. Sanq is fallen. You are not my Prince. There is nothing left between us, remember?"

Zechs looked down and blinked. What is there to say? He could barely make her out in the dark, but he didn't need to see to know she is there, and how she stands, how she is trembling to hang on to every last shred of self-control, how she rubs her eyes with a fist, determined not to cry. He had somehow caused her grief, again. It broke his heart.

"Noin, I… I never meant that." He fumbled to find words for what he did mean. "I just thought… it wasn't fair to force you to stay by my side, not for the sake of something that no longer exists. I thought you were happy with Donn."

His hands hovered over her shoulders, close enough to feel the heat radiating off her, not daring to close the distance.

"'You and I make two', you said. Remember?" Zechs could feel himself choking. He had to force the next words through. "As long as you and I are still alive… … You are… my partner…"

_Partner_. Best friend, companion, keeper of one's soul. The word hardly held a candle to what she was to him, but he didn't know any others that would suit.

"I was frightened, at that time." He swallowed the bitter saltiness overwhelming the back of his throat. "_Svala_, I cannot lose y…"

She cut him off with a brief finger to his lips, unwilling to hear the rest, so they stood close together in the dark, barely touching, and fought silently to bring themselves back in check.

He lost count of time. Finally, Noin coughed up a laugh, a small, light, highly embarrassed, sound that sounded embarrassed of itself. "I was too harsh towards him, wasn't I?"

"A little," Zechs joined her in a similar chuckle. "Though he probably deserved most of it."

"He's right. I should be more lady-like."

The tall blond smiled. "Yes. I doubt he could have said anything to deserve a full glass in the face. What was in it anyway?"

"I think it might have been wheatgrass."

"Oh dear."

They shared a comforting low chortle and everything seemed better somehow, in the cool, stagnant atmosphere of the closet.

He turned to unlock the door.

"Hey," Noin mumbled hesitantly with a shuffle of her feet. "Do you… do you want to know what he said?"

Zechs straightened and watched her expectantly. Whatever it was, this would be a clue to her recent agitations, if not the reason itself.

Noin inhaled sharply, feeling the blush take over every inch of her skin, thankful for his inability to see it. It was oddly important to make this confession, although she could not find a single logical reason for it.

"He thinks there is sexual tension between us. He said I should just kiss you and get it over with."

Noin wringed her hands as the seconds trickled by, willing Zechs to say something, anything, to get the humiliation over with. She was his partner, his best friend. There was a wishful hope on her part, but mostly, admitting she felt a sexual tension towards him was really awkward, possibly as much as it would be if she had to tell him that his sister has an incurable lust for him. Thankfully, Relena didn't.

She couldn't hear his pulse racing in his ears. All she heard was his voice as he gently put his warm hands on her arms, a finger's width down from the tip of her shoulders, calm and even as usual.

"So… why don't you?"

He was drawing her towards him. Did he realise he was doing that? She pressed herself against his chest, an automatic response.

Her mouth went dry. She licked her lips, another automated response, slipping her arms up and around the back of his neck, pushing herself up on tipped toes, pulling his shadowed face towards hers. It was like her moment in space, where nothing felt real or connected, and nothing made sense.

She touched the tip of her nose to his, entranced in the caress of his breath on her lips. "Because," she rasped thickly through her frozen consciousness, "I'm afraid that once I start, I wouldn't be able to stop…"

And that was when the screaming started.

**...**

.

**A/N**:  
The Wheel of Fortune is the 10th card of the Major Arcana in Tarot, in case you're wondering how #10 fits in.


	24. Red: Corpus Delicti

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#019 赤  
A.C. 197, August 11, 14:38:「Corpus Delicti」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

The first body was a floater in Reservoir D, identified as Williams, one of the assistants to the Chief of Staff of Engineering.

It was his blood being pumped into the bathrooms and the Mess Hall in Sector B that gave him away. If whoever had slit his throat had thought to drain him properly before throwing him into the water-tank, it might have been several days before he was found.

The biggest casualty from this incident, asides from Mr. Williams himself, was Polly Hickory, a physicist whose thought to identify the thread of scarlet in her water was to taste it. To her credit, she had not screamed at all, instead, turning to her horrified colleagues, muttered. "Hn, I think it's blood."

She developed a minor staph infection that cleared up in days.

The second man's face was mangled beyond recognition, crushed into the back of his skull like most of the rest of him. That's what happens when a Mobile Suit stomps on you. The question is _who are you_, and _what did you say to the Suit?_

"Security, stand clear," the tall blond announced coolly to bystanders around the Aries' Mechanic's Pit, and vaulted himself easily over the protective railing, landing on his feet at the end of the forty-feet drop. His partner, the _Marsprojekt_'s security teams always move in twos, took the cage-lift.

She does not admonish him as usual for attempting to break his ankle. Her attention was captured fully by the octagonal band glinting on a severed finger at her feet. It appeared to have ricocheted off the side of the cage after the initial… propulsion was not quite the right word, but it was the one that came to mind.

Zechs read everything he needed to know from Noin's face. She looked as though she had found half a worm in her apple. Any lesser woman would have thrown up or passed out. It was a Space Guild ring, similar to the one she was expecting in the mail, issued exclusively to members of the First-Class.

"Are you sure?" He asked gently.

She poked at the pulpy appendage with a pen and an iron stomach.

"No, not without further verification. He was the only First-Class member onboard before this morning, though," she answered, referring to her own induction into the Space Guild as a member of the First-Class hours ago. There were thirty-seven engineers and mechanics affiliated directly with the Space Guild registered to the Megmillion Corporation's Mars expedition, of which seventeen were full members of the Second-Class and nineteen were Guild-sponsored Journeymen— talented young men and women apprenticed to the Guild and groomed as potential Second- or First-Class members— and, until very recently, one member of the First-Class, excluding Lucrezia Noin.

Zechs grimaced at the mess. _Loose teeth, ground meat_, "that may be the only identifiable thing we've got." _Something's not right here,_ though he couldn't quite put a finger to it.

The ship's scheduled dock at the Central Hub was cancelled, curfew announced, and a taskforce assembled, all within the hour. Noin was upset that the Chief of Security ordered them off the case, Zechs was unsurprised. The print had confirmed the identity of Sheldon Donnovan.

"Do you think he suspects us, or is trying to protect us?"

"Why not both?"

_Marprojekt_'s Chief of Security, twenty-six year-old Terren Miller, is a phantom, a man whose idea of personalising something is adding his initials to it. This may have a little to do with his strict Asian upbringing, although, truthfully, it was mostly Terren Miller. He is the kind of man who made poker-faced Trowa look like unruly Duo. The desk against which he was leaning was standard issue, impersonally empty like the rest of his office.

One would have never been able to tell, except by familiarity with his blithely ordinary face, that he was the young man who inherited Miller Industries, the Earth Sphere's largest legal ammunition manufacturer, upon the humane euthanasian of his deranged father in A.C. 193.

Twenty months ago, Terren switched the company's main product from bullets to health supplements, sending panicked stockholders to the boardroom and scandalised media-dogs to the presses. In his own words, "there's remarkably little difference between making a pill and making ammo, except the pills are cheaper."

Six months later, he gave the company to his elder sister, Mira Miller, and retired from the life of a genius entrepreneur into obscurity, thus securing his place on Lady Une's very exclusive Persons-of-Interest list. The basis for her concern, Zechs realised after his first encounter with Terren's tarry Asian eyes, was one that he agreed with whole-heartedly. Incredibly intelligent and shrewd men like Terren Miller do not just content themselves with dropping off the face of the world and joining experimental space programmes. It disturbed them both, as survivors of Treize Khushrenada, that they have yet to find his angle.

"I am not suggesting anything, Miss Noin," Terren smiled ambiguously, revealing little of his true agenda. "But the fact of the matter remains, that there have been two deaths aboard this ship in as many hours. My prime directive is ensuring the continued safety of those that remain.

"I have heard things, I admit. My people say that 'the face of beauty bodes many troubles'. There is a whisper that Mr. Williams was responsible for Miss Noin's incident with the gravity booster, and that she was dating Mr Donnovan, which, together, makes this all appear highly coincidental." He shot Zechs a meaningful look.

"I do not believe you believe in coincidences, Milliardo Peacecraft."

Zechs flinched out of habit. It was still difficult to remember that his Princely identity was no longer a secret that needed guarding. Beside him, Noin growled, balling her fists.

"We can take care of ourselves, Mr Miller."

"I have no doubt, Miss Noin," Terren dropped his scrutiny to the perfectly polished black leather shoes he stood in, the traditional footwear of high-powered business executives throughout the ages. "And I do admire that. However, I hope you can understand my position as well, and the incredible risks I took when I hired the pair of you…"

Zechs did understand, which was why he said nothing.

Perhaps if he had, Noin would not have gone to the gym.

'Cat-fight' is not an accurate description of what happened there. Women who were tough enough to become Mobile Suit mechanics do not fight like ordinary girls, they fought like the men they worked alongside, throwing their full strength behind each tackle and blow, landing each one as surely as they intend it.

Zechs found himself joining the spectators accompanied by Auldo, an aging engineer who thought well enough of him to appear at his door the moment news of the scuffle broke out. _"People can say what they like about you, boy, you ain't gonna shoot a messenger, not for telling you your partner's in trouble."_

The Lightning Count had thanked him, through his worries were reserved for Sheldon Donnovan's apparent fan-club. There were a number of things he and her were prepared for, although facing down his bereaved female supporters was not one of them. For one, Zechs had been unaware of Donn's popularity amongst the ladies. But Noin, he explained to the crooked old man, has yet to lose a match she intended to win.

"_Now, that may be, but you're still gonna come watch. What good's a friend who won't watch ye win a fight?"_

He almost laughed.

Terren Miller arrived alone, solidifying from the shadows with a polite cough that put an end to the display of determined women circling, and inadvertently failing, to teach the ex-OZ lieutenant a lesson.

Only the keenest observers would have noticed his disinterest as he competently took stock of the situation— eight angry and grieving women took it in their minds to physically confront the reason Sheldon Donnovan was taken from them for good: his alleged girlfriend— and injuries— three concussions, five bruised ribs, four split-lips and two lost teeth shared out amongst the eight attackers, and a slightly bloodied jaw, a limp in the left leg and various scrapes on Noin— and confiscated all the wagers and footage collected in the sidelines.

To everyone else, his attentions did not come to rest on Zechs until the pilot brushed past him to lend a shoulder to his brunette wingman.

"Peacecraft, one murder is a tragedy, two begets conspiracy," Terren mused darkly, a cold hand pressed firmly, subtly, against Zechs' clothed navel, "and three suggests a serial. Which will this turn out to be, I wonder?"

If it weren't for the success of military conditioning, Noin's knuckles would have kissed him blind.

**...**

.

**A/N:**  
I'm not much of a Mystery writer (should have thought of that before deciding this instalment was going to be a whodunnit), so instead, this chapter is more rife with bad puns and oblique references than usual, heh. See if you can catch all of them…  
For the curious, I imagine Terren to be a vaguely SD Ootori Kyouya.


	25. Good Night: Witching Hour

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#024 おやすみ  
A.C. 197, August 12, 01:38:「Witching Hour」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

Curfew commenced at twenty-two hundred hours, restricting all personnel to their quarters, save those security officers on patrol and a skeleton crew confined to the areas of their job responsibility.

The Expedition Commander had not seen fit to challenge his Chief of Security on such extreme measures. Paisley never meant to be a commander of anything except an army of clerks. The way he saw it, he was the expedition's whipping boy, and there may be some genuinely medieval tortures in his future if he couldn't get this murder thing quietly sorted by the time his next status report was due. At any rate, the effects were barely noticeable to the majority of the _Marsprojekt_'s population of astroengineers and xenogeologists, whose benefits included godly and flexible work hours. Others, such as Doctor Teryl Rothery, were glad to trade off night-shift for the solitary holiday.

So far, all Terren Miller has achieved was antagonising the guiltily paranoid and pissing off Noin, which Zechs found amusing in its needlessness.

He had taken them off the roster, disguising it as an act of kindness, like he did with his insistence to personally escort her around after the attack in the gym. Noin fled into her room at eight-thirty p.m. If Terren seemed unsuspicious of Zechs' decision to follow suit and take an early night, it was because he had already received confirmation from the man sent to bug Zechs' room.

.

_Fifty-six._  
At one thirty-eight in the morning, a man stared at the flawless ceiling in his grey, somewhat cluttered, room and counted out the time on his internal clock.

_Fifty-eight._  
He slipped quietly out of bed and fished out a standard issue utility belt by the sliver of light shining through his doorway. Watch the light. There, mid-way along its path, it becomes, briefly, no more than a thread, and widens again to fall across his boot.

_Sixty. Time.  
_He pried the door open with a nail-file. The trick, as in all things, was in applying the perfect amount of leverage to cause it to roll back on its own mechanisms. That, and a piece of insulation stuck over the locking mechanism.

Zechs tore this off before moving on. He did not expect to return until curfew is lifted, better that no one discovers that he had rigged the lock.

.

_One thirty-six a.m., twenty-two seconds._  
A door slid soundlessly open, spilling artificial light into a small, grey room. A woman laid in wait in her bed, curled up in a foetal position, appearing sound asleep to the world. Beneath the covers, her fingers flexed painfully around cold metal and regretted the rash fist-fight she had gotten into earlier. Scraped knuckles may not be a huge handicap, but she would have felt better knowing that she was in top condition, all the same.

_Thirty-three._  
The watch on her wrist pulsed with faint blue numerals, counting out the seconds through her thin blanket. She has not taken it off since arriving in Mars space. Her late boyfriend joked often about her obsession with time. She never told him why. Today was the hundredth day she has borne her latest name. This is significant to her, as she thinks day One-hundred-and-one may be the day she finally gets to use it.

_Thirty-eight._  
There were two men in her room. If she made this quick, she can still make her rendezvous. One was next to her now. She could feel his gaze burning into the exposed nape of her neck. She could feel him leaning down towards her, reaching out. She gritted her teeth and threw the covers back, shoving her trusty semi-automatic into his shadowed face. _"Don't move."_

"Hey, darling," the man backed away, murmuring in familiar soothing tones, "'s me."

She fumbled. Her jaw dropped. The recent days of normalcy had made her soft. It only took that one confused heartbeat for his companion to get behind her, and everything exploded in a starburst behind her eyes.

"You moron," the first man snarled, smacking her assailant across the face, "I told you not to do that!"

.

_One forty-two.  
_She was not there to greet him at the end of hallway A-25. He pressed on, as though not noticing. It would be more accurate to say that he transitioned seamlessly into Improvise Mode and took a turn that would take him to the hangers, instead of the deserted medical bay they were going to head for.

Clearly, things have not gone as planned. Two men were dead, though they had promised themselves there would be none. They had thought themselves on top of things, these hapless victims of hubris, and now all that was left to do was saving the situation they ought to have prevented. Part of him had to question if they had been deliberately shoddy in hopes of invoking these circumstances. He had not felt so alive and _real_ since last Christmas.

.

_One fifty._

An explanation is in order. Roll back eighteen months, to the first days of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. Fearing the influence Relena Peacecraft held over the world in the wake of the Eve War, the new government decided to bridle it by giving her a seat amongst them as the new Vice Foreign Minister, a paper-doll position if ever there was one, as she well knew. Her adoptive father, Victor Darlian, had held this position for most of her life. It had been the previous administration's means of keeping the ex-Sanq senator under their thumb; different verse, same song.

They should not have presumed that she had won the hearts of the world by being a pretty child or the long-lost Princess of a fairy-tale kingdom, although she was both these things too. Before they'd realised, the Mars Colony Initiative, also known unofficially as Queen Relena's Mars Terra-Formation Proposal, had won an unprecedented 84% approval rating throughout the Earth Sphere. To refuse the people on this would have been suicide. To refuse to bear ownership of the project would be giving the ex-Queen-of-the-World opportunity enough to unseat the entire parliament.

The Mars Colony Initiative encouraged the donation of weapons-grade nuclear, beam and artillery materials for the construction of thermal and atmospheric adjustment devices necessary to adapt the red planet's environment for human survival. In other words, Relena was forcing the new government to confiscate all weapons too large and dangerous to be easily disposed of and detonating them on Mars. The favourable changes they would cause in Mars' core temperature and atmosphere were merely a happy coincidence and bait for the masses.

Zechs had been proud, even with the flies in the butter. Collecting the world's supply of Weapons of Mass Destruction created a highly volatile target for any number of people from aspiring despots to black-market traffickers, though nothing, Lady Une had been sure, that he and Noin could not handle.

He could not fault her choice. There is no hope for back-up if anything should go wrong out here, eight days past the nearest Earth Sphere outpost at top speeds. Sending in her most lethal and, lets face it— disposable— agent was the right call.

.

_One fifty-nine._

Nothing unusual in the cockpit of the Aries Suit Donn had been found under. The Suit's exterior had been detailed for biohazard risk as soon as Security Chief Miller would allow it. Zechs dropped into the mechanic's pit to check the Aries' toes anyway.

Donn's death was still surreal. Admittedly, Zechs had not liked the bearish man, and while he regretted the mechanic's fate, he could not in good conscience say that he was sorry to be rid of him, but not like this.

He had hoped Mongolia, A.C. 194, would be the last time he's had to witness the results of being squished like an ant by a giant mechanical doll. He had to execute the pilot who did it, and Officer Bueller had welcomed the release. It would take a desperate man to do such a thing, and some sort of monster to walk away afterwards, unscathed.

Crouching over a bloody crevice between the floor plates, Zechs frowned. Something about the crime scene bothered him greatly. It was not just that someone had deliberately ground a man to a pulpy mess identifiable only by his unique ring and a chance printable finger, nor was it the silent threat that it could have easily been him or Noin laying in a jar in Med Bay A.

.

_Two eleven._

A grey dollhouse of deserted walkways and social areas danced across the grim man's spectacles, picking up the peculiar blue glow of refracted security footage. Terren cannot be blamed for suspecting Zechs and Noin, given the known facts. It was not beyond the realm of possibility for someone obsessed with Noin to hold a grudge against her boyfriend, Donnovan, and the first victim, Williams, the man responsible for the priority maintenance order that resulted in Noin's infamous space walk. A tenuous connection at best, still, it was the only commonality that could be discerned between him and the mutilated mechanic.

He was certain that Zechs Merquise was deeply involved. Zechs has every opportunity of fitting the criminal profile between his war record and traumatic childhood, despite everything on his Psychological Evaluation Papers. Faked psych reports have become harder to obtain with the new global emphasis on Pacifism, though not yet impossible, and certainly cannot be too difficult for someone as resourceful as OZ's Lightning Count.

Terren was concerned. The differences between the fates of the two victims seemed to indicate dramatic instabilities in Zechs' psyche, if indeed he had been the sole perpetrator. Someone who cuts a man's throat and dumps his bleeding corpse into an eighth of the ship's supply of potable water is a sociopath, whereas one who would wilfully reduce another man to mulch is indubitably a psychopath. It may be more plausible to assume that there were two killers.

The best-case scenario, in his mind, would involve the psychopath and the sociopath ridding him of each other before the night is out.

It had occurred to Terren several times, as he followed the tall blond's cat-like progress through empty halls, that Zechs may be following a conventional lone-star behavioural pattern and attempting to flush out the true culprits. He put it down to wishful thinking. The whole reason Terren was so fascinated by Zechs was because Zechs had rarely shown himself to be conventional. Why start now?

Besides, Terren Miller did not believe in best-case scenarios— or worst-, for that matter— He believed in the foreseeable fact. The fact is, Zechs Merquise had broken out of his room and was sweeping through the corridors in search of something. Whether he turns out to be the hunter or the predator appears to be seen.

Terren loaded a gun and watched.

.

_Two fourteen._

Jonathan Williams came into Zechs' attention nearly two months ago, and had been skilfully stalked ever since. The thing about murder, Terren had said, _one is a tragedy, two begets conspiracy…_ He had been right, though not in the exact details.

Noin was the one who first pointed out the awkward boy, neither as young nor bright as he liked to pretend. She had been curious as to how and why a trivial noise complaint became a maintenance priority, and had hoped to harness those channels to make a few suggestions of her own. She found Engineer Williams.

More than a generic sycophant, Jonathan Williams was The Bootlicker. Every band of villains has at least one, tolerated by the head villains because most people become villains in order to be worshipped anyway. He is the man who joins up for the sake of belonging to the same wicked secret club as someone he admires or craves to become, then gives the game away by affecting the smug swagger of a man who has been permitted to share a room with a wicked, secret, club. Men like Williams can always be relied on to kiss and tell, if you knew what to listen for.

They were a hair's breadth away from discovering the ringleaders to his weapons-thieving plot when Williams was silenced. Noin feared that he had been executed and that the same men had butchered Donn either mistaking him for the proverbial Forces of Justice, or to send them a message. Although he agreed with her, Zechs could not shake the feeling that there was something else afoot.

It made little sense to bring attention to yourself with murder when you were basically trapped in a titanium alloy cage approximately eighty million kilometres away from Earth and any possibility of sustained freedom, unless you intended to seize control of the vessel. This would have made a reasonable plan, especially when you are going to need a fairly large ship to get away with the loot, except the _Marsprojekt_ remained firmly in the hands of Terren Miller with no sign from anywhere whatsoever of a challenge.

So, if not to create mass hysteria in which to hijack the spacecraft, why dispose of a body where hundreds of people could instantly notice something was wrong by turning on a tap? For that matter, why crush a man with a Mobile Suit? There were easier, neater ways of disappearing bodies in space.

.

_Two thirteen._

They say that in the instant before you die, your life passes before your eyes and takes on a new clarity. It doesn't.

No, nothing so glorious as that. You remember just as much or little of yourself as you do when you're alive, avoid the same truths and invent the same lies, and that clarity isn't clarity at all, but a last ditch effort at finding some proof that you had lived and mattered. Dead men do not find deliverance, only selfishness.

When the man sitting in the dark had died, he had remembered places: Brussels, Mogadishu and Corsica, among the other backdrops that shaped his life. It had been a rather disappointing revelation, until he realised what he had to do.

.

_Two sixteen.  
_He would not leave her side, afraid, in the long silence, that she had been struck too hard and would require medical attention he and his men were not qualified to give.

"She's fine," his accomplice hissed fretfully. "Come on, anyone who leaves a fight with Greta standing on their own legs has got a thicker skull than I can crack."

The brooding man glared and threw him out of the med bay. It will be some time before he can bring himself to forgive his minion for hurting the princess.

"Make yourself useful, go find us a hidey-hole or something."

A third man, on look-out in the hall, scowled. "Wait, 'us'? You can't take her with you, if they find her missing in the morning, they'll start searching the ship."

"So you'd better find us a brilliant spot no-one'd think to look in, eh, Mason?"

Wesley did not understand what was going on with the woman in the bed. He had been assured that she would be onboard with the Cause when he'd helped the other two men slip into her room to explain the situation. He did not think exposing himself to such a risky expedition was a very clever thing to do, though considering the relationship between her and their de facto leader, Wesley could vaguely understand why he wanted to be the one to tell her.

The problem began when she apparently pulled a gun on him, frightening Mason into knocking her out. Granted this could all have been an unfortunate misunderstanding, tensions being high what with two of their own brutally murdered, Wesley was starting to suspect Sheldon of losing his marbles. He had not been right since her accident two months ago… wasn't it said that Williams had something to do with that?

Chief Miller was right, that woman was trouble.

Sheldon blamed it on Zechs Merquise, suggesting that their King had always been somewhat off-kilter, possibly due to his exposure to the ZERO system. Klein, the man who brought them all together, had decided it was time to introduce the Peacecraft to his army, and with a scoffing laugh, Prince Milliardo cut Williams down and chased Klein and Sheldon into the hanger, where they got separated and Sheldon somehow lost his ring-finger.

Everything the Lightning Count had ever done right, he said, gulping down Wesley's whiskey to drown out the agony of his missing digit, was because of his Lieutenant. She was the one with the ideals and the vision. Peacecraft would never have been able to create the world they wanted because it was Lucreza Noin's world all along, one that she had been manipulating the Peacecraft to achieve. They should have realised it from the start, but it was not too late to adapt their plans for _him_ to her.

Come to think of it, he'd probably lost Wesley on the severed finger. Wesley's brother had been a computer scientist in the employ of the Romefeller Foundation. The ZERO system, as far as Wesley could understand, destroyed men by bombarding them with undiluted sanity, ripping apart their souls in the transformation of their minds from man to machine. There could be nothing sane about sawing off a man's finger, or stomping on someone in an eight-tonne Mobile Suit.

But Wesley followed directions and kept his mouth shut. Because if anyone had gone space-crazy, it was probably Sheldon. And when you're trapped on a quarantined ship with a man whom you suspect of having killed two men in cold blood and hacked off his own finger, you do as he tells you and pray for a clear shot at him before he blows anything up.

_Two thirty-two.  
Two things happened at once, three if you consider that his accomplices had been out of contact for the last six minutes or so, but the man hovering over Noin's bedside did not, so we shall count two in the order as discovered:_

Firstly, she stirred with an involuntary, whimper that filled his heart with so much gladness that he thought he would burst.

It didn't, because a nickel-sized spot of cold metal against the back of his neck leeched all the warmth away.

"Raise your hands and step away," a deep voice instructed quietly.

He did neither.

"You haven't not come to rescue her, have you, Merquise."

"No," the man behind him admitted easily. "I'm just here to stop you."

Sheldon Donnovan spun around, grabbing for the gun to his head with a strangled cry. "You cold bastard! After all she's gone through with you, the least you could do is pretend to care!"

**...**


	26. Violence: Madness

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#021 強奪  
A.C. 197, August 12, 02:32:「Madness」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

"_You cold bastard!"_ Donnovan howled, whipping around to make a grab for Zechs. "After all she's gone through with you, the least you could do is pretend to care!"

Zechs cursed under his breath and dropped to the floor, hoping to trip the larger man up. He missed.

Donnovan didn't. 'Bear-like' is not a means of describing Sheldon Donnovan as a clumsy man. The Russians, for example, have used bears as a symbol of ferocity and raw explosive power for centuries. His foot crashed into Zechs' ribs. Somehow, the smaller man staggered away.

"Don't make me kill you, Donnovan."

Donnovan laughed bitterly. "Oh, you'll do it for any excuse. _I know_." He stumbled towards Zechs, glowing faintly under a layer of sweat. He was not right. "I finally get it now, how that clockwork heart of yours tick…"

Zechs ducked his madly flailing arms and hurled his whole weight behind an elbow in Donn's stomach. He barely flinched, instead grabbing Zechs by the collar and pinning him against the wall.

"What about yours?" Zechs growled, groping for a distraction. Donn burst into more hysterical laughter as Zechs realised a heartbeat too late how that sounded.

"Isn't that just like you? See? I told you I get it now!"

He grabbed the blond and threw him back into the wall again, pushing his glistening face into his. "Klein had to go," he rasped, "he was going to ruin everything by giving it to you. But how can you be our saviour when it's all your fault in the first place? And Williams… Williams thought me mad, so I threw him in the tank to cool off… and then I thought, what would our idol do? So I minced Klein up, just like you would! And pretended it was me!"

He started to giggle. It was not a pretty sound. He let Zechs go.

This was a mistake, because the second he was free, Zechs fumbled for his gun and fired two shots into Donn without even looking. The large man crumbled to his knees with a cry, flicking warm, acidic beads of moisture everywhere. Blood blossomed on his pants, over his thigh and knee.

"Donnovan, you need help." Zechs eyed him up critically, widening the distance between them.

"No." He seemed to be calming down.

Still pointing his gun between Donn's eyes, Zechs edged towards the bed to check on Noin, god knows what they've done to her…

"_You stay away from her…!_" Donn lunged at him with surprising agility the split second Zechs' eyes turned towards the groan behind him. A brief wrestle later, Donn emerged victorious, sitting across Zechs' chest with his pawish hands wrapped around the pilot's neck and Zechs' gun just beyond reach.

"I don't want to kill you," Zechs maintained as calmly as he could, desperately working out how he could avoid getting killed himself.

"That's okay, I know you want to," Donn giggled again. "You're thinking how pretty my brains would look on the floor… and I'll let you…" Donn shifted, freeing Zechs' arm, and crushed his slender fingers in place around the pommel of a pistol. Keeping one hand on Zechs' windpipe, he guided the barrel to his face.

"We're going to show Lucy just how much of a monster you really are." He whispered, and stuck the end of the weapon in his mouth, forcing Zechs' finger down on the trigger.


	27. If Only I Could Make It Mine: Save Me

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#026 ぼくのものになれば良いのに  
A.C. 197, August 12, 02:35:「Save Me」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

"We're going to show Lucy just how much of a monster you really are." Donn whispered, sticking the end of Zechs' gun into his own mouth, one hand on the smaller man's throat, the other forcing Zechs' finger down on the trigger.

For the second time in the last five minutes, something small and cold brushed up against the back of his neck.

"I know what he is, Donn, there's no need to have your head blown off for that."

Donnovan relaxed. Tears welled up in his bloodshot eyes. She was okay. His Lucy was okay. He let Zechs' arm drop form the weapon, although he did not ease up from where he sat, bleeding all over his chest. The cold weight on his skin dug in.

"Hand me the gun, Donn, there's no need for any of this," she instructed, her voice low and harsh.

For a moment, as Zechs struggled with his newly freed hand to pluck Donn's fingers from his windpipe, it seemed as if he might.

"No." It was by far the sanest sounding he has been all night. "No, Lucy, I can't. He's taken everything from you, honey, keeps taking you from me… can't let him get away with that…"

And caressing the pommel of the gun in his hand and pointing it between Zechs' eyes, Donn started to weep silently, each gigantic sob rippling through his entire being.

The smell of blood suffocated his senses more than having a two-hundred pound man bearing down on him. Two things occurred to him that seemed entirely irrelevant to the situation: one, that this must be the most embarrassing way to die the Powers That Be can arrange for him; two, he hoped that Noin will be okay.

It does not occur to him that she could have shot Donn or let Donn shoot himself and get all this over with. The current situation seemed to be the only logical sequence of events, in his failing judgement. Donnovan dominated his line of sight, and the thought on the forefront of his mind was how she was going to kill him if he left again without a proper good-bye, and how much easier it was to survive nuclear reactor explosions than a man sitting on your chest wavering between wringing the life out of you and planting a bullet in your head. At least this time, it wouldn't be because he was running away.

"Donn, no. No." The tremor in her contralto was oddly calming. He knew it as the timbre that colours her voice just before she breaks down, and he thought what a bastard he was to be glad to hear her cry for him in the end.

"Don't make me shoot."

"Don't joke around, Lucy," Donn replied, like a child patiently explaining the rules of his game to an oblivious adult, "you could never shoot anyone."

Slowly, Noin circled around them and knelt in front of Donn without a single glance for Zechs, and her partner realised why she hadn't done much more than talk to his mad assailant when she let a brass button drop from her hand. It was an amateur prank the cadets at Lake Victoria used to play, pressing metallic objects of an approximate shape and size to a muzzle to each other's heads and seeing how long before the other realises there was no gun.

"You're right," she coaxed, "I can't bear to see any one get hurt, no matter how much they deserve it. Don't hurt anyone for my sake, Donn. Please."

The pressure on Zechs' throat eased. Air raked through his lungs, breaking apart the darkness on his senses.

"No, too late for me… …" His arms shook, clutching the pistol between his palms. Donn smiled and paid no attention to Zechs, who at this moment is struggling with the mathematics of knocking the pistol out of his hands far enough that Noin could get to it before Donn does. It would almost certainly result in his face getting smashed in and being rendered useless to Noin's defence afterwards, though, if the silly girl doesn't shoot.

"Donn." She was backing away. Zechs balled up his fists. Did she read his thoughts? Is she moving into position? She moved out of his field of vision, He swore under his breath. _Come on, Noin!_ He missed his partner, that girl who called herself his loyal knight and never missed a cue. The woman who, had she been by his side, would never have let this happen. It was as much his fault as hers, if only he'd thought to hold on to her before she disappeared on him…

"Donn," she said, and Zechs fumed at the woman who'd stolen his Noin. "This is your last chance. I'm holding poison, so choose. You can kill him, or come save me."

.

"_You can kill him, or come save me_."

How many women throughout history have tried this gambit and how many times has it worked? Noin does not know. She had thought it the single most ridiculous thing one could say when she first heard it in her sister's study, a different lifetime ago. Oh, wouldn't Isadora laugh to hear her now…

She had hoped it would distract Donn enough to give Zechs a chance at getting free and… Well, she hadn't thought that far ahead yet, but hopefully, he had.

Noin let the syringe she had impulsively injected herself with fall to the floor for effect. Donn struggled to his feet, releasing Zechs, and ambled blindly towards her position on the infirmary bed, everything forgotten except her plight. She sought his fevered eyes and held them firmly, mumbling indistinct soothing words in answer to his wild gibberish, as she had been taught.

She had seen this before, on one of her missions with Sally. She has had nightmares about it. Schizophrenic delusion triggered by a mix of emotional stress and addictive withdrawal. She should be feeling incredibly guilty about the relief roaring in her ears, the treacherous voice in her head that chanted _It's okay, it's Donn who's got it, not Zechs_ like a mantra. She wasn't. Over and over again, _Thank god it's not Zechs._

There were nights where she'd woken up in a cold sweat, dreaming about discovering Zechs in such straits. Not that she can't find any good, logical, reasons for the concern, psychopathic Zechs was not something that should even be wondered at. Had he been the one with the problem, it would have been more direct, and merciful, to kill everyone onboard herself. After all, Zechs Merquise had taken on the ZERO system with barely a mark on him.

Those close to them had blamed his hostilities during the Eve War on the Epyon's AI, but they did not know him like she does, nor have they seen him as she has, running down his prey like a bat out of hell at age twelve. Zechs had not been consumed by the Epyon when he rode out against Earth, nor when he raised his weapon twice and tried to strike her down. It was Milliardo Peacecraft who had been in command of the Devil's reins; out of control and mad with disappointment, but it was all him.

Him, that familiar tall blond with the hard blue eyes, sneaking up behind the man whose attentions she held in thrall in her hands, a sacrifice to the terrible beast that reared its head in his wiry, bloody, silhouette. Noin lifted her eyes to him just as he flipped his pistol around and swung his arm down, cracking the back of the poor madman's skull open with the pommel.

Only when he was sure that the big man with the bloodshot chocolaty eyes was no longer a threat did he glance at her. _'Are you alright?'_ He raises an eyebrow and lets himself fall into a sitting position next to her, panting and holding his ribs.

_Was just saline,_ She thought at him, shook her head slightly, and buried her face in her hands. The night could have gone a lot better.

She felt his arm slip around her shoulders, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and pull her towards him in a sticky embrace. Zechs' chest was soaked from where Donn had bled all over him. It should probably frighten her, how much blood the mechanic had withstood losing. She should at least be bothered by how Zechs was causing her to be covered in blood. Instead, she was preoccupied by the warmth of Zechs' breath gently stirring her hair as he dropped a light, companionable kiss on the top of her head.

Donn had called Zechs a monster. He had not been wrong.

So, what does that make her?

**...**

**A/N:**  
Uhm, in reply to responses to the PSA, I didn't say I was going to stop, seeing we're what, 4 themes to the end? I just mean to say I'm sorry I'm not more responsible in regards to the confusing, not always "in character", often completely whack-jobbed excuse of a story I've apparently been subjecting you to, and that I am not going to bother with making sense of it all any more, just concentrate on hitting all 30 kisses, then moving on to the real story-writing... you know, as opposed to rambling on in 1000+ word drabbles heh


	28. Wada Calcium CD3: Kiss Kill

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#028 ワダカルシウムCD3  
A.C. 197, August 12, 22:42:「Kiss/Kill」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

Also not in any way a pharmaceutical endorsement or libel.  
There is absolutely nothing wrong with WADA CALCIUM CD3 pills that I am aware of.

**...**

When Chief of Security Terren Miller strolled into the medical bay in the dead of the night during curfew, he found two of his security officers, Merquise and Noin, leaning against each other on the infirmary bed, bloody and spent, resting their feet on the prone body of a man who had been generally presumed dead twelve hours ago.

"He's alive," the female officer assured dully before he could get closer.

"Yes," Terren said mildly, "I wonder why."

Zechs raised his gun, too weary to take aim. "What do you want, Miller."

The bespectacled man smiled. It was the kind of ambiguous villainous smile that sinister young men with glasses pulled off so well. "I'd like to see you in bed. There's a curfew in effect and it would look bad for me if my own officers were found in defiance of it."

It seemed a reasonable enough proposal.

Noin even had second thoughts about her harsh assessment of his character, until she was woken up barely three hours later by his ship-wide broadcast announcing the end of the _Marsprojekt_'s quarantine, at which point she decided he was a sadist.

She took Zechs' advice and left the clean-up to conventional channels. So long as the threat was not to World Peace, he'd pointed out, it was out of their jurisdiction anyway. She thought about it and filed his words away for future reference. It was a good cop-out, and Terren Miller was frighteningly effective. The entire scandal was dealt with by the end of the day, with elegantly phrased deniabilities wrapped up in a PR-friendly speech meant to allay concerns over more members of the crew going space-crazy.

Officially, Sheldon Donnovan suffered a methamphetamine–induced psychotic breakdown. Although how he had acquired the drug eighty million kilometres from Earth remained a mystery, it was a sufficiently embarrassing situation for the Space Guild that further lines of questioning were quickly dropped; along with the misplacement of some security footage from Donnovan's room on the evening of the 12th depicting part of Chief Miller's routine collection of the disgraced mechanic's personal effects, during which Donnovan's team-mates held him at gunpoint.

"You really should pay more attention to your image as Prince of Pacifism, Peacecraft," Terren observed in a cynical half-laugh.

"We will take that under advisement," Zechs nodded graciously.

He offered no resistance as Noin extracted the three vitamin bottles he had pocketed only a second ago and patted him down thoroughly.

"Tell us about… WADA Calcium CD3, Mr Miller," she suggested pleasantly, peering at the labels.

"As you can see, Miss Noin, it is a combination supplement of calcium, L-ascorbate and cholecalciferol."

"Vitamins don't turn perfectly normal people into psychopaths, Mr Miller."

"Ah," he actually chuckled then, "Clearly you have not met some of my ex… business associates in the pharmaceuticals industry…"

_Click-click._ Zechs cocked his weapon.

"It is an unimaginably stressful field," Terren finished, "Much like yours, I imagine, Preventer Wind."

"I no longer answer to that name," Zechs replied, every bit as smooth as he was.

"Of course."

"The pills, Mr Miller."

Terren met and held Noin's deep purple gaze steadily, and she knew before he spoke again that he wasn't going to tell them anything they didn't already know, if at all, and that they were going to let him. Just like the Space Guild.

Noin had to admit, there was a certain twisted poetry in spiked vitamins, turning something good for you into a means to destroy you. They'd already guessed when she took the pills from him that they have more than likely found the source of Donn's methamphetamines. Whether the problem was in the tablets or merely repackaged in these bottles remained to be seen, and was ultimately unimportant. The WADA brand was a famed competitor to the Miller family pharmaceutical holdings, so, in the light of how much he stood to gain when the WADA brand's involvement breaks out into scandal, why would Terren want to cover it up?

The painfully average-looking man smiled into her eyes.

"I am an opportunist, Miss Noin, not an idiot."

Zechs lowered his arm as Noin retreated to his side. Teren turned to face them.

"And being such a despicable opportunist, I propose a bargain: one small, inconsequential compensation for keeping your dual identities secret."

They could have walked away. It was true that the had yet to reveal themselves as Preventer agents for a purpose, as long at the nuclear weapons stockpiled for the Terra-formation project remained available, it could still pose a threat to the Earth Sphere and their life-long struggle for its conversion to Total Pacifism.

But Zechs was curious, even intrigued, by the cold Asian man.

"What do you want?"

Terren smiled sweetly, almost cheekily.

"A kiss."

Zechs frowned a little, and looked at Noin. It made sense now, his suppositions of tragedy stemming from an attraction to Noin. If he felt that way about her, this would not be the first time someone has projected their own reasoning and fantasies onto others. Naturally, it put Zechs' flags up that he had basically implied having considered murder for the sake of an infatuation. Still, Terren had not been the one to go charging about the ship guns a-blazing from the fires of love and jealousy raging in his chest.

A kiss could be inconsequential, though it was hardly his place to tell her what to think.

"Noin?" He prompted softly when her shocked silence persisted past his silent conclusions.

"Oh no, not from Miss Noin," Terren took a step forward, capturing his bright blue eyes in his endless black, a hand landing lightly on the edge of Zechs' free hand, where the back met his palm. "A kiss, Peacecraft, from you."

...

**A/N:**  
L-ascorbate – vitamin C  
Cholecalciferol – vitamin D3  
I tend to write for heterosexuals when I do write about couples at all. Am I anti-yaoi? No. But like all relationships, I prefer my homosexual hook-ups to make character and canonical) whether fanon or series) sense. Unless it's a PWP. Actually, m favourite pairing types are Narcissists. I don't know why, could be lasting damage from being into MinaminoKuramaxYoukoKurama at a young impressionable age.


	29. Sound of Waves: Aphrodite, Borne High…

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#029 波音  
A.C. 197, September 19:「Aphrodite, Borne High On the Tide」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

Terren Miller, it turns out, was a man of his word, if not of honour. He kept their secret Preventer identities secret— even going so far as to be co-operative— though he could not pass up on any opportunity to snipe at Noin about his price. On her part, the young woman kept her thoughts and misgivings to herself. Easier to feign disinterest in her partner's social dealings than to get caught up in the tumult that characterised them again, especially without a romantic commitment, as much as Donn could have been called that, to keep things in perspective. And finally, the day their mission would come to an end began to dawn.

They had been in the field for nearly seventy-eight hours, camping three to a single occupancy tent in a frozen valley that looked deceptively hot, snoozing, working, living in their spacesuits, and being bossed around by pasty-faced xenogeologists who argued constantly about blast ratios and convections. The exact trajectory of a weapon had never been so anally debated. She was just relieved to see them go off.

Noin laid awake listening to the sound of Zechs breathing next to her, in and out, ebb and swell, like the wash of waves kissing the shore, wearing down on her. Terren had used her recent accreditation from the Space Guild as an excuse not to assign a replacement for their fallen mechanic, which certainly made sneaking around secretly being Preventers easier, though at the moment she rather wished he hadn't. Anything would have been welcomed at this point, even one of Zechs' imaginary masked Martians, if they could fill the space between them.

It was not Donn, because Donn had only been her excuse and excuses rarely continue being reasons once their illusion has been broken. She sighed, and fought the urge to run her fingers through his hair, the colour of genuine Earth sunshine.

What she realised, watching him then, with definitive clarity, was that it wasn't failing at their jobs that got them into trouble, it was forgetting who she really was and attempting to go back to lives that she and Zechs thought they could have. Zechs was wrong, they could not co-exist in a world where her life and service was not forfeit to him. They would tear the world asunder finding their feet, and then inevitably destroy each other making sense of it.

They barely speak about the things that had happened. They hadn't actually spoken about anything since he'd sent her away in that stroke of despair on Christmas, 195, over surviving the Libra crash; and Noin was unsure if Zechs was being kind by waiting for her to be ready, or if he had already moved on and put it all out of mind.

It felt, sometimes, as though she was merely riding a current, letting things carry her forward blindly, not wanting to care where she was headed or what the consequences might be, pretending that everything was just the way she liked it when in fact, she had just been too weary and frightened to do anything about it.

That itself was out of character, if Lucrezia Noin could be considered to have her own character. Noin was a lie. She did not have a mechanic father who'd gotten her into the Lake Victoria Academy through some vague dealings with a minor nobleman. She was not a native of the Bavarian countryside. She had not lost her childhood home to anti-Alliance terrorists. She was not the Earth-exiled ex-OZ lieutenant, accused of conspiring against national security with the Lightning Count. She was not Lucrezia Noin, Zechs Merquise's long-suffering rival and confidante. She did not want to stop being that girl.

But then again, growing up is never a choice.

.

A new age begins, and Zechs— Milliardo Peacecraft— is surprised to discover that he is enamoured with the Martian landscape, sweaty, grimy, unwashed-ness and all. He had made himself a promise months ago to enjoy Mars, not expecting there to be anything likable about the dead red planet, and here he was, gawking like a school boy, touched like the first time he had ever seen the Sun, or the Earth.

Zechs had become a soldier out of necessity rather than interest, and bore the burden by never allowing his mind to wonder what else he could have made of himself. Now that all was past and he is, against all expectations, still alive, it was high time to set about exploring this. And if travelling to a whole other planet sphere in order to meet himself seemed somewhat unconventional, Zechs was learning that the description appealed to him like no other.

Donn had been right. Even though Zechs had now learnt to be a little bit leery of the outright sympathisers, who evidently tended to be zealots, every now and then he would run into people who were sensibly, if cautiously, accepting instead of the blatant aggression he had been prepared to suffer.

"Mostly we just don't know what to expect of you," Doctor Clyne, a double PhD in microbiology and biochemistry smiled over mugs of hot chocolate. "There's been so many stories that nobody knows quite what to think. Will you be the charismatic hero we were led to idolise and believe in under the old regime, or the madman we were told almost crashed a nuclear warship into Earth? Do you expect to be treated like the noble that you are, or as the equal you pretend? Are you, as the rumours have it, able to survive in pure vacuum, or do you need a spacesuit like everyone else? Nobody knows this about you except Miss Noin. You can't blame them for being apprehensive. There are some who do not even believe you exist, that the figure of Zechs Merquise, or Milliardo Peacecraft, was a crafty invention of OZ's to lobby for Colony support."

"Perhaps I should hold a press conference," he joked, to mixed reception. It could have been worse, he could have suggested holding one _up_. Zechs told himself that Treize would have found it funny, and he was probably right.

Trailing behind the scientists helped him give Noin space. He did not know how much Donn had meant to her or how badly shaken up she had been by the poor excuse of an operation they had pulled together to stop his psychotic rampage, and thought that badgering her about it was not what she would most like him to do.

In fact, Zechs had been afraid of clinging to Noin for almost half his life. Man has the tendency to hold on to things that were familiar to him during times of great personal upheaval, much like Zechs did to ideas of vengeance and restoration while growing up. He could not allow himself to do the same to her. Noin was his rock and shadow. He valued her for herself and the part she plays in his current life, not because she was all that was left to him after that fateful day Sanq fell, and he meant to keep it that way.

So he had been understandably confused when, instead of answering his musings, she turned off communications and walked her Suit away.

.

He wanted to know her plans for afterwards, when their dues to The Preventer have been paid and they were Freeman again, remarking with a little laugh that they had certainly put it off long enough. It was a perfectly legitimate question, but it was not the one Noin waited so desperately for him to ask. Needed him to, so that he could force her confession.

_Why did you come to Mars?_

He wanted to stay with the expedition, she could see that without trying. He had started to make himself at home with objects scattered haphazardly in odd corners of his room and little attempts at inconsequential socialising. He told jokes and asked after people, and took a genuine interest in the jobs and lives of those people. He was once again the young OZ Colonel whom everyone had adored, taking the world around him in confident strides, turning her head in hallways all over again.

And maybe that is the problem, because she was no longer twelve, enamoured with the dying splendours of honour and chivalry, or fifteen, infatuated with a rising star, or even eighteen, terrified of being alone in the world. She was Twenty-One years and twenty-nine days old, and all the dreams of her childhood exhausted. She was angry, because for all of his ability to anticipate his opponent's moves on the battlefield and all of the rumours calling them the perfect partnership, he could not seem to understand her enough to create the right opportunity, for her sake, for the right answer.

She completed her last task with clockwork precision and managed to continue avoiding him until they got back on the _Marsprojekt_, peeling themselves out of their space suits back to back in a narrow locker.

"I didn't hear what you thought about my earlier plan," Zechs picked up the conversation easily, as though they had set it aside through mutual agreement.

"Sounds nice. I've been thinking about going home, myself," Noin shrugged, nonchalant. "Maybe change my name, I haven't really planned it out.

If Noin had been honest, she would admit that she thought he had said he wanted to stake out some land on Mars and raise Space Chickens and dismissed it out of hand. A part of her was still curious as to what he had actually said, and would have been devastated to hear that she had not heard wrong at all. It really was a plan involving raising space chickens on Mars, and knowing Zechs, one should also note that while it was mostly a joke, there was a part of him who thought it might be nice.

"I'm sure Lady Une can make some sort of arrangement for us," Zechs answered thoughtfully.

The mention of Lady Une was like a basin of water in Noin's face, reminding her of harsh realities she had promised herself to face.

_Why did _you_ come to Mars?_

"You don't have to come, it's just things I'd always promised myself I'd do on my own, like exploring the fringe colonies and all that."

"Why didn't you?" He asked pleasantly, oblivious to her despondent undertones. "You don't think enough about yourself, Noin, sometimes you need to forget about everything else and go for what you…"

"I was waiting for you!" Noin snapped, whirling around on her heels. "I stayed on Earth because I thought if I'd gone anywhere else, you wouldn't be able to find me!"

Zechs gaped, momentarily stunned by her temper, and reverentially touched cold fingers to her flushed cheeks. "Lucrezia," he smiled endearingly, daring to gather her into his arms, "_Svala_, I would have found you anywhere."

His fingers found her chin and tilted her face back so he could look into her eyes, deep purple, like the fringes of space and the colour of his dreams. He kissed her, wishing there were more effective ways of sharing with her the depth of his emotions.

"No," she whispered hoarsely, and repeated the syllable again, to break his spell. "No.

"I should have been the one looking. You are the Master, not I," she held up her hands against his protests. "But that doesn't matter, Peacecraft, because in the end, you came back for Miss Relena and the World, not me."

His perfect brow creased. "Noin, I…"

"Don't apologise, that's exactly how it should be. You have always belonged to them. You are not alone, Zechs, I am not the only person capable of liking you. Give the world another chance. Otherwise what's the point of us saving it?" She brought up the brightest smile she could manage and gracefully detangled from his embrace.

_I'm running away from the future._

"I think I've earned a vacation from the World and its crises, though," Noin laughed softly, only a touch of hysteria showing.

"… …" Somewhere, someone had evidently decided to mark the occasion by broadcasting the Earth Sphere's supply of large-scale weaponry detonating in a sensitive chain laid out across a barren planet on all available audio and visual channels. The thunder drowned out her last words. They waited, studying the ashen anxiety mirrored in each other's faces. Some things they will never shake, like the way their ears prickled and their spines froze and their hands go numb at the sound of explosive weaponsfire.

Noin coughed and broke away first, in the brief lull after the first sequence. It will be exactly five minutes before the next series of charges went off, time enough for her to make an escape from the cramped room.

"I was saying, I won't be staying."

There was no uncomfortable shuffling, no emotional surge. Apparently, having said it once made saying it again easier. She shrugged, shut the metal door swinging behind her, and quietly left.

**...**

A/N:

Sept 19 is Independence Day in St. Kitts and Nevis, the first British and French colonies in the West Indies.


	30. So Hey, Uh: Breaking Dawn

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#005 「あのさ」  
A.C. 197, December 24:「Breaking Dawn」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

**...**

They did not look so completely out of place in the L-4 colony Spaceport as they had feared, among the masses of other friends making last fond farewells to each other as they sent each other back to their families for the holidays.

There were any number of reasons as to why they were here now, a year from when she brought him back to life, two from when he let her witness his death. They chose the most mundane, the excuse of the Christmas break, to avoid picking one of the more difficult ones.

The turnover rate on a civilised Interplanetary space mission was fairly high. Even at only a little more than a week from the nearest Colony, the stresses of being isolated in space, far away from the Earth Sphere, took its toll. Although he had expected his security officers, particularly Lucrezia Noin, to be hardier than that, the Chief of Security authorised the release of her contract with alacrity. She tried not to notice.

They walked easily together, as though this wasn't good-bye, as though it wasn't rejection. She wouldn't let him help her with her things, just as she wouldn't let him help her pack. In the end, she managed to fit her entire life up to this point in a single three-quarter full duffel bag. He had to wonder what she had taken with her and what she had left behind.

Some part of him almost stayed away, arguing hopefully that she might reconsider in his absence. He rest of him was unconvinced. After all, it was, to his best guess, the distance that had sprung up between them in his selfish absence a year ago that drove her away. No point adding more nails to that coffin.

It wasn't Mars that drove her away, or the botch-ups and deaths. It was him, reminding her by his mere existence of everything she could have been and everything she had lost. Donn hadn't known the half of it when he'd implied in a maddened state that Zechs had taken everything from her. He'd thought he was talking about a stellar career with the paramilitary Organization of the Zodiac and a home on Earth. The truth was much worse than that. Zechs hadn't even left her her name.

"Here is fine," Noin broke their tranquility in front of the ticketed zone. She pulled herself upright, her belongings perfectly deposited at her feet, the habit of military standards.

Zechs briefly contemplated snatching it up and making a break for it, and abandoned the thought out of the need to respect her decision. They weren't children anymore. Twenty-One year-old Noin had made that abundantly clear.

"I'm glad," she said, her eyes soft. "It is hard to remember that we are standing in a new world when we are fighting always, however secretly, for it to be born. I look forward to seeing this world that you and Treize and Relena have invented."

Zechs was silent as he struggled with the lump in his throat.

"Take care of yourself, Zechs."

He grimaced.

"It'll be tough without you around,"

She smiled. "Don't turn me into a bad habit."

"Too late," he said softly, reaching out delicately for her hand.

Painfully, Noin shook her head. No, it can't end like this, too much has been broken to be mended with a simple unspokoen _"stay with me"_. Why couldn't he have said something when they were fifteen, eighteen, or in those weeks after he came back? Before… before she had realised the mistake they would be making; before Mars. Was there even a 'them' left worth saving? Did she still want there to be?

It was the war and everything that had led up to it. It was wondering when he would excuse himself from her life again, just when she'd rebuilt it. It was waking up mornings not knowing what to do with herself, and standing in doorways wondering how to address him and how to be addressed. It was remembering all the worst possible things they had done and said to each other and not enough of the good ones. It was sharing a space with him and not knowing what to say, as if they have exhausted all possible conversation.

She wanted to see him in a romantic light, there were even phases in their lives when she had. But ultimately, they were Zechs-and-Noin, and after everything they've been through together, every secret, every wounding word, every mistake, every death; after all that, there simply wasn't any room left for romance between them anymore.

"It is too late, Peacecraft, I can't think of a way for us to go back to how we used to be, and I don't think we should."

Silence again, and his features stilled as he drew back into the grim façade of a stony Prince. He could say nothing, because she was right. Noin held his eyes resolutely. This may be the last time she will ever see herself in them. _Say something, Zechs,_ something in her begged, refusing to believe in the truth that she had spoken and that they both knew. Trailing behind him forever was an escape, not a calling.

She leaned in and kissed him good-bye, a chaste press of her mouth to his cold lips. Like a statue, as always, he would only mutely accept.

Noin smiled and broke away. That was the real problem between them. No matter how seamlessly they were able to compliment each other in life and war, they have never quite been able to keep up with each other in the waltz of emotions. She will always love him, as a brother, as her master, as a friend, and as her Prince from the Stars; and he, he may learn to make new friends, marry Princesses and find other women to love, but he will never forget her. That seemed to be the extent of their romantic capabilities.

She picked up her bag and disappeared into the turnstiles. She will regret it in a few hours when the realisation sets in, they both will. She will spend the next indeterminate number of months beating herself up, unable to decide if she hated herself more for kissing him or leaving him, and one morning she will wake up fine.

On that morning, she will be able to think about him and feel all the warmth and love that had existed unspoken between them with none of their old guilts and resentments and longing Could-Have-Beens. That is the morning she will sigh in relief, knowing she had successfully avoided a future in which she would look back in fifty years and regret never having let herself become anything more than his plot device.

**...**


	31. 逃げ水キスの30回: Turtles All The Way Down

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

#Bonus Track: 逃げ水キスの30回  
A.C. 197, December 24:「Turtles All The Way Down」

Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB  
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.

...

#22 揺り籠  
Once upon a time, a prince sat in his tower window— much like the woman gazing far away into the Inter-Colony Shuttle window— and told himself tales of magic and adventure to see him through the hot, sticky afternoons, heavy with the fragrance of Lindenwood smoke.

#06: 夢と現の間  
It was not so long ago that he had run through the gardens and palaces of Europe pretending to be a Lost Boy. Now that he was one, it really wasn't as much fun as he'd hoped. Perhaps it was as his Wendy Darling'd said, the disillusionment of growing up. Fortunately, he was a Lost Boy, and those grew up to become Captain Pans.

#14 ラジカセ  
Fifteen years later, a woman on the shuttle in Launch Pad 6 at the L4-D768 Spaceport listened to the same fairy stories on headphones and fancied herself to be a little bit of the same. She wonders if that was her trouble. Like Peter, she had gone to fight a war only to find both the lives being offered at its end too strange and barren to bear.

#20 かえり道  
To anyone who asked, she smiled and said she was thinking about going home. This vague answer was accepted readily by the Spaceport customs because nobody working at the Check-In desks actually cared. They were busy imagining vacations in much more exciting destinations, like Earth.

#25 フェンス  
If she was being truthful, or sensible, that was where she would be going, too. She had been born on Earth, although all the moving around she had done in the last three years had muddled her instinctual certainty of what 'Home' was, and she had friends there. On the other hand, these were good reasons for her to go anywhere but. She tugged absently on hair that hung in loosely ragged ends, victim to her indecision between keeping it short and growing it out.

#15 perfect blue  
Things were supposed to be ideal now. Cleansed in the fires of war and reborn by grace after centuries of conflict of one kind or another, it was a world she had tried her best to help deliver into the coming century, and she was proud of it. She also knew enough of human nature to not want to stare too closely at its perfect blue; lest she is forced, realist that she is, to admit the rose-tint glasses she wore for the subject.

#02 音沙汰  
She promised herself to write eventually. She did not mean to disappear, she just hadn't known what to say, how to explain the new state of affairs in her life, how to be around her old friends without falling back into the patterns she was determined to break out of. She did not think they would be terribly concerned to not to hear from her for a while longer. It wasn't that she was anti-social, it was that she had been a career soldier for so long that enforced military habits— such as fuel efficiency and maintaining information blackouts until the completion of an objective— have become personal ones.

#28 ワダカルシウムCD3  
For lunch she had half a portion of what was colloquially known as 'Colonist's Rations', a crude cocktail of vitamins and minerals of particular importance to a colonist's diet disguised in a chocolate bar. If this was what they were expected to live on, it's no wonder the people in Space resented the people on Earth these past forty years. Even the lowliest grunt's emergency rations were better than this, under the United Earth Sphere Alliance.

#08 二人の世界  
She would have gotten herself some real food, except everything here was sold in pairs and she had nobody to share with. The stores offered His-and-Hers as the standard, hotels and restaurants sported double occupancy rooms and meals served for two. D768 is a Couple's World. She wished she had known this before, so she could have packed a sandwich.

#23 飴玉  
Singlehood rested uneasily in the back of her throat the way new states of being and foreign candy did, although she had never thought of herself as romantically attached. And like sweet treats from a different land, the notion was familiar enough to be easily received, yet alien enough to cause varying degrees of apprehension. Perhaps the most fitting aspect of the metaphor was that she was not fond of candy.

#10 #10  
Still, there was one advantage to being a lone traveller in a popular couples destination: the extra room. This was especially luxurious to someone who has spent most of the last twelve years in tight cubicles. Not expecting anyone to want to join her, and to allay the jitters from not having anyone watch her back, she slumped the duffel bag stuffed three-quarters full with her pieces of worldly precious in the empty seat between her and the shuttle's aisle and draped her bistre leather flight jacket over it, creating The Dozing Man In Aisle Seat Ten.

#18 「アーン？」  
She did not see the beautiful young man until he appeared, reflected, in her tiny shuttle window. He smiled at her briefly, smiles that were glimpses of the stars through a crowded city skyline, glimmers of cold fire so beautiful it could break your heart without a thought yet remain completely untouched behind the self-assuring glass and stone. The preen of a man who knew exactly how lethal his every look and tilt of chin could be and strutted it without a care.

#21 強奪  
"May I have this seat?" He inquired in affectations of genteel birth and settled in to the right of her with Dozing Man in his lap, jacket and all, before he could be refused.

#01 こっち向いて  
The woman who turned from her revelry to regard him behind large aviator sunglasses could have been around twenty, with the wariness of several more lifetimes than she had business holding on to lurking in her almond face; or in her middling fifties, with the number of a really good plastic surgeon. He felt her gaze whip sharply across his posture in a manner reminiscent of a glorious raven-tressed Marchessa he had once admired, long ago, at a child's birthday party.

#12 ゴキゲン  
"Hello, _mademoiselle_, I'd hoped you would tell me where this shuttle is headed," he cut her off pleasantly, a sparkle in his piercing, dazzling, blue eyes. He was rewarded by a tiny, surprised, flinch as she was thrown off-balance by this idle chatter between amicable strangers.

"If there is some place you're going to?" She recomposed herself in a flash, flawlessly matching his distantness.

#13 余計な鎖  
"Not particularly," he replied. "When in pursuit of a quest, one's destination is an excessive concern."

"I am not one for understanding literary devices, sir," she confessed with a polite smile.

"It's nothing terribly important," he explained, "I came to the spaceport this morning to send a dear friend off to a fresh start and realised that person had the right idea all along. Somehow or another, it brought me on this shuttle, next to a beautiful woman.

"You may have to protect me," he grinned, "my boss will kill me when I don't show up for work next week."

#17 kHz  
She let her eyes sweep and linger over his aristocratic fingers and the web of calluses and old scars that mapped his career as a pilot and a man of war. A corner of her expressive mouth twitched, and she went back to watching grey-uniformed workers push ramps off the runway.

"That's odd, your voice is similar to someone I know, but you don't sound like him. That guy never did anything he was not fully confident in." He'd never admitted to needing her, either.

#16 無敵  
"With you by my side, I can be confident of anything," he said in quiet gravity.

#11 くちなしの花  
The man held out his left hand, palm up in invitation, and with a shrewd flick of the wrist conjured a white origami blossom out of thin air. It rested serenely on his fingertips, challenging what fortune that had caused it to become refined wood pulp instead of a flower with peaked, rose-like petals.

#05 「あのさ」  
"Let's start over. I am Milliard Neunt-Zechs."

#08 スーパースター  
Zechs, derived from Zechs Merquise, hero of the novel _L's Sanctuary_ by Caerulea Surgere, once popular in the European courts around A.C. 170. The Lightning Count had once sworn her to secrecy regarding the origins of his name, though he had never told her why.

#26 ぼくのものになれば良いのに  
"As I recall," the woman pointed out, studying his offering with a melancholic set in her firm jaw, "Zechs Merquise married the Empress and lived happily ever after."

#19 赤 (裸)  
"I wouldn't know," Milliard mused truthfully, boldly pinning the paper trinket to her luggage, a liberty that might have made any lesser woman blush. She remained an unmoved statue when he searched out her stormy eyes. "I have not actually read it."

#04 キミとボクのキョリとアノコ  
She arched a disbelieving eyebrow. Pretty words. What would-be hero picks a moniker from a book they have not bothered to read?

"Treize's sister suggested it, from her favourite novel," he fumbled verbally and was again the defensive little boy whom, once upon a time, she could not leave behind. "She was always reading out excerpts of his heroism. It seemed a good avenging name… All I could come up with was Char Aznable."

#27 零れる  
She began to chuckle, a warm, deep-throated bubbling like the song of secret, unspoilt brooks. "Perhaps that would have been slightly more dignified," she shook her head helplessly at the choices. "Caerulea Surgere wrote soft-core erotic romance."

#03 ユル！  
He groaned under the weight of over a decade's naive social embarrassment and buried his face in his hands. "_Cher dieu…!_ If Relena finds out…" Then, dawning horror— "But Anatolie was twelve!"— and suspicion. "How do _you_?"

#24 おやすみ  
She continued to look bemused. He did not need to know that she had a vintage Collector's Edition in her bag, a family heirloom of sorts, nor that it had been her bedtime story (naughty bits censored) for years before she ever found him.

#29 波音  
Stripped of the sex and romance, _L's Sanctuary_ was a fine fiction of political ideology and court intrigue rumoured to be penned by a prominent noblewoman of the Sanq Kingdom court. The young woman on the shuttle did not need to know that the authoress, her mother, had based the character of Zechs Merquise on her girlhood experiences, nor that a few of the dispossessed-Marquis-turned-gentleman-thief's exploits had even been true.

#09 ダッシュ  
"I'm sorry," the blond man apologised, withdrawing once again into the persona of one half of a pair of strangers in a chance shuttle encounter. "Evidently, I'm not very good at making friends, or starting over with old ones."

"It is a tricky process," the woman replied kindly, revealing mysterious purple eyes under her Aviators. "Don't rush it."

#30 キス  
She held out her hand after a certain consideration, presenting her left palm angled down and thumb separated from forefinger by exactly forty-five degrees. "Alessandra diLuculo," she said to him coolly. "Or 'Noin' is fine too."

...

**A/N:**

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said:  
"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."  
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"  
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"  
~ Stephen Hawking, _A Brief History of Time_

_Turtles All The Way Down is a matter of Faith._

**Glossary:**  
逃げ水 - Japanese. (_nigemizu_) Mirage  
キス - Japanese. (_kisu_) kiss  
30回 - Japanese (_kai_) 30 encounters/episodes/rounds  
Together makes "30 Rounds of Mirage-Kisses", not quite "A Mirage of 30 Kisses" (ah, don't students of multiple languages just adore grammatical nuance) but we can go with the latter if it makes more sense to you...

_Neunt_ – German for "ninth", a variation on Noin/Neun.  
_Char Aznable_ – the not-as-hot Gundam character that Zechs is an upgraded AU-version of.  
赤 (裸) in #19 (_aka-hadaka_) means "stark-naked" and/or "frankness" in Japanese.


	32. atogaki

**30 Ways to Conquer Mars**

**Atogaki - Afterword**

There, _NOW_ it's done.

This was hard! I really hadn't thought it through very well when I claimed the pairing. Turns out, neither Zechs, Noin or I are kissy people, lol

Massive thank-yous to everyone who've stayed with me on this. Unlike Noin, I AM an anti-social person, which explains my lack of personalised responses to each and every review and my clumsiness in dealing with fans and sometimes latching on a little too strongly to casual well-wishers. Do NOT mind me. I'm just the jabbering maniac charged with bringing you the word.

And now that it's all settled up, there will be no more said about this continuity. I admit, I'm quite relieved to be done with this. Forget whatever that does not make sense or leaves you going "but what about...???" If it appears in a few chapters then disappears, I probably forgot what I'd thrown it in there in the first place for and tried to sweep it under the carpet hahaha...

Number 31's kiss is "Kiss and Make Up", in case you're wondering, and yes, Zechs' new name could be read as "Noin's Zechs" *cough* did I mention he's an Aquarius boy? They can be such daft, romantic sops.

Number 30's line "Don't make me a bad habit" is inspired by Minirain's 3-part "When Love Becomes a Habit" (.).

I think I've accomplish pretty much what I'd set out to do when I'd first sent in my claim. I'd thought to use it as an engine to help develop a post-EW story idea I had, and have concluded that that story sux. So I found a better one. Watch out for it in the new year =)

2009 will be different. A more humane timetable, more coherent plots, and continuously updated versions... well, that is the plan. I want to offer up work people would pay money for-- not that I seriously mean to charge for fanfiction, unlike some members of Anime fandom at large-- so remarks along that vein on the up-coming serial would not be taken amiss. I generally accept con-crits too.

With that, I'm off to bed.

Current time is 7a.m on December 31st 2008.

**...**

Dec 21st 2008 - An Editorial Dilemma

The first thing you faithful subscribers to this undertaking have to understand is, the 30_kisses challenge was an excuse to get me used to writing again, and to throw thoughts and ideas around and get them out of my head, and tell myself "hey, look you CAN finish something with more than one chapter in it!" and prove each of my excuses for never becoming a prodigy teenaged author wrong.

I'd never expected to gain a readership, much less the support I've received on this half-baked endeavour. I picked ZxN because they bore a special significance to me. I'd thought the GW fandom dead in every circle except yaoi, and the pairing was pretty obscure to begin with.

The perimeters I'd set myself were to write 30 chapters by the end of 2008, using the 30 kisses, to form some kind of continuity and do more than simply jot down notes like "what if this and that and this happens, so possibly that, and this would be a cool thing to say..." without bothering too much with making sense, but at least readable and meeting the bare minimum standard of "postable".

Like I said, I didn't actually expect anyone to pay attention.

But you have, and for that I am both ingratiated and ashamed. You see, I can do better than I have been and because of that, I feel like I'm failing all of you with my every desperate and irresponsible attempt to pull through the rest of this experiment. But I'm going to finish it, so I must apologise for that.

What I'm trying to say is, thank you for the love, for noticing and supporting me, and I'm really sorry I'm being an irresponsible "brat with computer". The actual stories will be better. Really. It's part of my new year's resolution. That and to settle on an appropriate penname.

...


End file.
